Abstract
Dense particle packings have served as useful models of the structures of liquid, glassy and crystalline states of matter1,2,3,4, granular media3,5, heterogeneous materials3 and biological systems6,7,8. Probing the symmetries and other mathematical properties of the densest packings is a problem of interest in discrete geometry and number theory9,10,11. Previous work has focused mainly on spherical particles—very little is known about dense polyhedral packings. Here we formulate the generation of dense packings of polyhedra as an optimization problem, using an adaptive fundamental cell subject to periodic boundary conditions (we term this the ‘adaptive shrinking cell’ scheme). Using a variety of multi-particle initial configurations, we find the densest known packings of the four non-tiling Platonic solids (the tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron) in three-dimensional Euclidean space. The densities are 0.782…, 0.947…, 0.904... and 0.836..., respectively. Unlike the densest tetrahedral packing, which must not be a Bravais lattice packing, the densest packings of the other non-tiling Platonic solids that we obtain are their previously known optimal (Bravais) lattice packings. Combining our simulation results with derived rigorous upper bounds and theoretical arguments leads us to the conjecture that the densest packings of the Platonic and Archimedean solids with central symmetry are given by their corresponding densest lattice packings. This is the analogue of Kepler’s sphere conjecture for these solids.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature08239/MediaObjects/41586_2009_Article_BFnature08239_Fig1_HTML.jpg)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature08239/MediaObjects/41586_2009_Article_BFnature08239_Fig2_HTML.jpg)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature08239/MediaObjects/41586_2009_Article_BFnature08239_Fig3_HTML.jpg)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature08239/MediaObjects/41586_2009_Article_BFnature08239_Fig4_HTML.jpg)
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bernal, J. D. in Liquids: Structure, Properties, Solid Interactions (eds Hughel, T. J.) 25–50 (Elsevier, 1965)
Zallen, R. The Physics of Amorphous Solids (Wiley, 1983)
Torquato, S. Random Heterogeneous Materials: Microstructure and Macroscopic Properties (Springer, 2002)
Chaikin, P. M. & Lubensky, T. C. Principles of Condensed Matter Physics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000)
Edwards, S. F. in Granular Matter (eds Mehta, A.) 121–140 (Springer, 1994)
Liang, J. & Dill, K. A. Are proteins well-packed? Biophys. J. 81, 751–766 (2001)
Purohit, P. K., Kondev, J. & Phillips, R. Mechanics of DNA packaging in viruses. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 100, 3173–3178 (2003)
Gevertz, J. L. & Torquato, S. A novel three-phase model of brain tissue microstructure. PLOS Comput. Biol. 4, e1000152 (2008)
Conway, J. H. & Sloane, N. J. A. Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (Springer, 1998)
Hales, T. C. A proof of the Kepler conjecture. Ann. Math. 162, 1065–1185 (2005)
Cohn, H. & Elkies, N. New upper bounds on sphere packings. I. Ann. Math. 157, 689–714 (2003)
Donev, A., Stillinger, F. H., Chaikin, P. M. & Torquato, S. Unusually dense crystal ellipsoid packings. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 255506 (2004)
Conway, J. H. & Torquato, S. Packing, tiling and covering with tetrahedra. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 10612–10617 (2006)
Chen, E. R. A dense packing of regular tetrahedra. Discrete Comput. Geom. 40, 214–240 (2008)
Jiao, Y., Stillinger, F. H. & Torquato, S. Optimal packings of superballs. Phys. Rev. E 79, 041309 (2009)
Hoylman, D. J. The densest lattice packing of tetrahedra. Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 76, 135–137 (1970)
Betke, U. & Henk, M. Densest lattice packings of 3-polytopes. Comput. Geom. 16, 157–186 (2000)
Minkowski, H. Dichteste gitterförmige Lagerung kongruenter Körper. Nachr. Akad. Wiss. Göttingen Math. Phys. KI. II 311–355 (1904)
Gardner, M. The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems Ch. 10 135 (Norton, 2001)
Cromwell, P. R. Polyhedra (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997)
Jodrey, W. S. & Tory, E. M. Computer simulation of close random packing of equal spheres. Phys. Lett. A 32, 2347–2351 (1985)
Rintoul, M. D. & Torquato, S. S. Hard-sphere statistics along the metastable amorphous branch. Phys. Rev. E 58, 532–537 (1998)
Uche, O. U., Stillinger, F. H. & Torquato, S. Concerning maximal packing arrangements of binary disk mixtures. Physica A 342, 428–446 (2004)
Donev, A., Torquato, S. & Stillinger, F. H. Neighbor list collision-driven molecular dynamics for nonspherical hard particles. I. Algorithmic details. J. Comput. Phys. 202, 737–764 (2005)
Donev, A., Torquato, S. & Stillinger, F. H. Neighbor list collision-driven molecular dynamics for nonspherical hard particles. II. Applications to ellipses and ellipsoids. J. Comput. Phys. 202, 765–793 (2005)
Golshtein, E. G. & Tretyakov, N. V. Modified Lagrangians and Monotone Maps in Optimization (Wiley, 1996)
Torquato, S. & Stillinger, F. H. Multiplicity of generation, selection, and classification procedures for jammed hard-particle packings. J. Phys. Chem. B 105, 11849–11853 (2001)
Donev, A., Connelly, R., Stillinger, F. H. & Torquato, S. Underconstrained jammed packings of nonspherical hard particles: ellipses and ellipsoids. Phys. Rev. E 75, 051304 (2007)
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to H. Cohn and J. Conway for comments on our manuscript. S.T. thanks the Institute for Advanced Study for its hospitality during his stay there. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under award numbers DMS-0804431 and DMR-0820341. The figures showing the polyhedra were generated using the AntiPrism package developed by A. Rossiter.
Author Contributions S.T. devised the algorithm and upper bounds, performed theoretical analysis, and wrote the paper. Y.J. implemented the algorithm, performed theoretical analysis, commented on the manuscript and created all of the figures.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Data and Supplementary Tables 1-2. (PDF 99 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Torquato, S., Jiao, Y. Dense packings of the Platonic and Archimedean solids. Nature 460, 876–879 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08239
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08239
This article is cited by
-
Precise Determination of the Saturation Coverage of Polygons In Silico Using Exclusion Assisted Packing Technique
Journal of Statistical Physics (2023)
-
Density Functions of Periodic Sequences of Continuous Events
Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision (2023)
-
Topology mediates transport of nanoparticles in macromolecular networks
Nature Communications (2022)
-
Numerical simulation on the effect of particle shape on mechanical response of proppants in horizontal fractures
Computational Particle Mechanics (2022)
-
From predictive modelling to machine learning and reverse engineering of colloidal self-assembly
Nature Materials (2021)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.