for this workshop
Soft packings, nested clusters, and condensed matter
at the
American Institute of Mathematics, San Jose, California
organized by
Karoly Bezdek, Nikolai Dolbilin, Egon Schulte, and Marjorie Senechal
This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will be devoted to modeling the geometry of condensed matter. The workshop will focus on "soft packing" and "nested clustering" phenomena in discrete geometric structures and their applications to understanding the internal atomic structure of solids and fluids. In particular, the workshop seeks to integrate the theories of tilings, coverings, and packings, and to develop new discrete geometric concepts and tools needed to study aperiodic structures such as aperiodic crystals.
The main problems for the workshop include:
- Nested clustering in aperiodic structures in Euclidean space. Structure theory for nested clusters; local rules for building global structures; local characterizations of global structures; and creating a catalogue of nested clusters.
- Soft sphere packing and its relationship with classical sphere packing. Optimal soft packings; density estimates; and soft packing analogues of the kissing number and contact number.
- Delaunay point sets in Euclidean space. Classification of Delaunay sets; geometric structures over Delaunay sets; local theorems; and Delaunay graphs.
The workshop will differ from typical conferences in some regards. Participants will be invited to suggest open problems and questions before the workshop begins, and these will be posted on the workshop website. These include specific problems on which there is hope of making some progress during the workshop, as well as more ambitious problems which may influence the future activity of the field. Lectures at the workshop will be focused on familiarizing the participants with the background material leading up to specific problems, and the schedule will include discussion and parallel working sessions.
The deadline to apply for support to participate in this workshop has passed.
For more information email workshops@aimath.org
