Searching for the true inherent state of a hard sphere liquid

Compressed hard spheres jam at a packing density that depends on the compression protocol. If the protocol allows for some degree of thermalization (broadly defined), then that density generically rises. It is therefore natural to define the inherent state of a given hard sphere liquid configuration as the lowest density at which jamming can be achieved through monotonic compression; the corresponding algorithm then funnels that configuration to the nearest jammed packing. However, all known hard sphere jamming algorithms appear to present some degree of thermalization, and while thermalization effects might be small in low spatial dimensions, they grow as dimension increases. As a result, vast discrepancies appear between systems that should otherwise be equivalent. Our recent algorithmic breakthrough for a minimal, single-particle model of jamming has found that inherent states can be exactly located from its Voronoi network. In this talk, we extend the resulting algorithm to standard (many-body) two- and three-dimensional hard spheres, thus finally obtaining their inherent states. The geometric interpretation of this ideal compression scheme and of the numerical results are also discussed.