Two-dimensional packing of soft particles and the soft generalized Thomson problem

Abstract

We perform numerical simulations of a model of purely repulsive soft colloidal particles interacting via a generalized elastic potential and constrained to a two-dimensional plane and to the surface of a spherical shell. For the planar case, we compute the phase diagram in terms of the system's rescaled density and temperature. We find that a large number of ordered phases becomes accessible at low temperatures as the density of the system increases, and we study systematically how structural variety depends on the functional shape of the pair potential. For the spherical case, we revisit the generalized Thomson problem for small numbers of particles N ≤ 12 and identify, enumerate and compare the minimal energy polyhedra established by the location of the particles to those of the corresponding electrostatic system.