Before the talk (~3:45pm), tea and coffee will be served outside 149 Weniger.

After the talk, there will be a reception with food and drink in 247 Weniger.

A defect free crystal is the apex of order. By contrast, when a liquid is cooled rapidly it forms a glass, an amorphous phase of matter that is the epitome of disorder. Nearly all liquids have a larger entropy than crystalline solids but lose entropy much faster as temperature is decreased. In 1948, Kauzmann recognized that there must exist a temperature at which the entropy of the liquid will cross the entropy of the crystal but dismissed as paradoxical the possibility of such an “ideal glass”. How could there be a liquid state that is both amorphous and highly ordered? Here, we show a nonequilibrium mechanism for creating a two-dimensional zero configurational entropy jammed packing of polydisperse disks at zero temperature, which we term an ideal jammed packing. Such a packing represents the zero-temperature limit of an ideal thermal glass, which is otherwise unreachable by physical processes due to a divergence in relaxation time.