It’s been a while since last post.
I’ve got hold of the polyhedra packing algorithm from Dense packings of the Platonic and Archimedean solids (thank you Yang) in C++ and rewritten it in Julia.
Here are the images from the first experiments of packing 8 tetrahedra in a unit cell.
Left is the initial configuration and right is the configuration after 1000 iterations.
The initial density is 0.06415 and and the density after 1000 iterations is 0.58888. For comparison the densest lattice packing of tetrahedra is 0.36735 but the densest found packing in the Nature paper is 0.82264.