Aleksandar Donev,^1,2 Frank H. Stillinger,³ and Salvatore Torquato^1,2,3,4

¹ Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
² PRISM, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
³ Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
⁴ Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

(Received 27 February 2006; published 6 June 2006)

Phys. Rev. Letters 96, 225502 (2006)

Abstract

We demonstrate that there is no ideal glass transition in a binary hard-disk mixture by explicitly constructing an exponential number of jammed packings with densities spanning the spectrum from the accepted amorphous glassy state to the phase-separated crystal. Thus the configurational entropy cannot be zero for an ideal amorphous glass, presumed distinct from the crystal in numerous theoretical and numerical estimates in the literature. This objection parallels our previous critique of the idea that there is a most-dense random (close) packing for hard spheres [Torquato et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 2064 (2000)].