Structure of marginally jammed polydisperse packings of frictionless spheres.

We model the packing structure of a marginally jammed bulk ensemble of polydisperse spheres. To this end we expand on the granocentric model [Clusel et al., Nature (London) 460, 611 (2009)], explicitly taking into account rattlers. This leads to a relationship between the characteristic parameters of the packing, such as the mean number of neighbors and the fraction of rattlers, and the radial distribution function g(r). We find excellent agreement between the model predictions for g(r) and packing simulations, as well as experiments on jammed emulsion droplets. The observed quantitative agreement opens the path towards a full structural characterization of jammed particle systems for imaging and scattering experiments.