Is there a glass transition for dense hard-sphere systems?

Abstract

The recent results for the contact value of the radial distribution function obtained from large-scale molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations of systems of dense hard spheres [M. D. Rintoul and S. Torquato, J. Chem. Phys. 105, 9258 (1996)] are compared to those of the Padé equation of state for a hard-sphere fluid (derived from the knowledge of the first eight virial coefficients), including the metastable fluid region up to a packing fraction of ηg≃0.56, and above such packing fraction to the ones corresponding to an equation of state of the free-volume type which presents a simple pole at random close-packing. This latter equation involves the same value for the pressure at ηg as the Padé equation of state, and arises in a consistent way from the application of a rational-function approximation method to the computation of the radial distribution function of a hard-sphere fluid. The substantial improvement of the agreement with the simulation results over the one obtained with the equation of state proposed by Torquato [Phys. Rev. E 51, 3170 (1995)] suggests that the hard-sphere fluid may indeed present a glass transition at ηg.