A heuristic approach for the densest packing fraction of hard-sphere mixtures.

In a previous work, a simple approach to derive the jamming packing fraction of a hard-sphere mixture from the knowledge of the random close-packing fraction of the monocomponent system was proposed. Now, an extension of that approach is applied to provide an approximate formula for the densest packing fraction of a given hard-sphere mixture in terms of the fcc close-packing fraction of a monocomponent hard-sphere system and of a single parameter encapsulating the dependence on the size ratios and the number of spheres in the unit cell. Comparison with recent results for such densest packing fraction of binary and ternary systems is performed and reasonable agreement is obtained. • Simple approximation for the densest packing fraction of any given hard-sphere mixture. • Fair ordering of data for the densest packing fraction of binary and ternary systems. • Possibly useful to identify and look for geometric structures not reported yet. • Approach easily extended to deal with mixtures of d -dimensional hard spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]