Elongation and percolation of defect motifs in anisotropic packing problems

Abstract

We examine the regime between crystalline and amorphous packings of anisotropic objects on surfaces of different genus by continuously varying their size distribution or shape from monodispersed spheres to bidispersed mixtures or monodispersed ellipsoidal particles; we also consider an anisotropic variant of the Thomson problem with a mixture of charges. With increasing anisotropy, we first observe the disruption of translational order with an intermediate orientationally ordered hexatic phase as proposed by Nelson, Rubinstein and Spaepen, and then a transition to amorphous state. By analyzing the structure of the disclination motifs induced, we show that the hexatic-amorphous transition is caused by the growth and connection of disclination grain boundaries, suggesting this transition lies in the percolation universality class in the scenarios considered.