CONTINUITY BETWEEN DISORDER AND ORDER IN THE SEQUENTIAL DEPOSITION OF PARTICLES

In previous work we pointed out that clusters of particles built through sequential quenching show increasing degrees of order as the temperature is lowered. In the low-temperature limit, a two-dimensional model system with a nondegenerate ground state would result in a perfect crystal. The opposite, high-temperature, limit corresponds to the case of random sequential addition (RSA). In the present work we study the continuous evolution from disorder to order at intermediate states using a triangular well potential to represent particle interactions. We investigate radial and bond-orientation correlation functions and the bond order parameter as measures of the degree of crystallinity of the structures up to a reduced number density of 0.65, which is close to the jamming limit of RSA.