Dense packings of identical hard spheres inside a cylindrical tube mimic the periodic structures of a variety of columnar systems such as nanotube-confined fullerenes and colloidal crystal wires. A rich variety of corresponding densest possible structures, many of which are helical (including the well-known double helix), have been predicted from the computational approach of simulated annealing.

This book presents a comprehensive description of a recently published practical method of sequential deposition for constructing and simulating all those densest possible...