Packing-limited growth

Abstract

We consider growing spheres seeded by random injection in time and space. Growth stops when two spheres meet leading eventually to a jammed state. We study the statistics of growth limited by packing theoretically in d dimensions and via simulation in d52, 3, and 4. We show how a broad class of such models exhibit distributions of sphere radii with a universal exponent. We construct a scaling theory that relates the fractal structure of these models to the decay of their pore space, a theory that we confirm via numerical simulations. The scaling theory also predicts an upper bound for the universal exponent and is in exact agreement with numerical results for d54.