Emergence of Wulff-Crystals from atomistic systems on the FCC and HCP lattices

Abstract

We consider a system of $N$ hard spheres sitting on the nodes of either the $\mathrm{FCC}$ or $\mathrm{HCP}$ lattice and interacting via a sticky-disk potential. As $N$ tends to infinity (continuum limit), assuming the interaction energy does not exceed that of the ground-state by more than $N^{2/3}$ (surface scaling), we obtain the variational coarse grained model by $\Gamma$-convergence. More precisely, we prove that the continuum limit energies are of perimeter type and we compute explicitly their Wulff shapes. Our analysis shows that crystallization on $\mathrm{FCC}$ is preferred to that on $\mathrm{HCP}$ for $N$ large enough. The method is based on integral representation and concentration-compactness results that we prove for general periodic lattices in any dimension.