Abstract
Hyperuniform point patterns are characterized by vanishing infinite-wavelength density fluctuations and encompass all crystal structures, certain quasiperiodic systems, and special disordered point patterns (Torquato and Stillinger 2003 Phys. Rev. E 68 041113). This paper generalizes the notion of hyperuniformity to include also two-phase random heterogeneous media. Hyperuniform random media do not possess infinite-wavelength volume fraction fluctuations, implying that the variance in the local volume fraction in an observation window decays faster than the reciprocal window volume as the window size increases. For microstructures of impenetrable and penetrable spheres, we derive an upper bound on the asymptotic coefficient governing local volume fraction fluctuations in terms of the corresponding quantity describing the variance in the local number density (i.e., number variance). Extensive calculations of the asymptotic number variance coefficients are performed for a number of disordered (e.g., quasiperiodic tilings, classical 'stealth' disordered ground states, and certain determinantal point processes), quasicrystal, and ordered (e.g., Bravais and non-Bravais periodic systems) hyperuniform structures in various Euclidean space dimensions, and our results are consistent with a quantitative order metric characterizing the degree of hyperuniformity. We also present corresponding estimates for the asymptotic local volume fraction coefficients for several lattice families. Our results have interesting implications for a certain problem in number theory.