Correlation between Voronoi volumes in disc packings

Abstract

We measure the two-point correlation of free Voronoi volumes in binary disc packings, where the packing fraction avg ranges from 0.8175 to 0.8380. We observe short-ranged correlations over the whole range of avg and anticorrelations for avg> 0.8277. The spatial extent of the anti-correlation increases with avg while the position of the maximum of the anticorrelation and the extent of the positive correlation shrink with avg. We conjecture that the onset of anticorrelation corresponds to dilatancy onset in this system. Copyright © EPLA, 2012.