Erratum: Physical Review Letters 97, 239901 (2006) Received 17 October 2006; published 6 December 2006.

Mikael C. Rechtsman,¹ Frank H. Stillinger,² and Salvatore Torquato²,³,^*

¹Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
²Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
³Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and PRISM, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
^*Electronic address: torquato@electron.princeton.edu

Received 25 May 2005; published 21 November 2005.

Physical Review Letters 95, 228301 (2005)

Abstract

We devise an inverse statistical-mechanical methodology to find optimized interaction potentials that lead spontaneously to a target many-particle configuration. Target structures can possess varying degrees of disorder, thus extending the traditional idea of self-assembly to incorporate both amorphous and crystalline structures as well as quasicrystals. For illustration purposes, our computational technique is applied to yield an optimized isotropic (nondirectional) pair potential that spontaneously yields the threecoordinated honeycomb lattice as the ground state structure in two dimensions. This target choice is motivated by its three-dimensional analog, the diamond lattice, which is known to possess desirable photonic band gap properties.