Understanding orientational disorder in crystalline assemblies of hard convex polyhedra.

Spontaneous self-assembly of hard convex polyhedra is known to form orientationally disordered crystalline phases, where particle orientations do not follow the same pattern as the positional arrangement of the crystal. A distinct type of orientational phase with discrete rotational mobility has been reported in hard particle systems. In this paper, we present a new analysis method for characterizing the orientational phase of a crystal, which is based on algorithmic detection of unique orientations.