A note on rattlers in amorphous packings of binary mixtures of hard spheres

It has been recently pointed out by Farr and Groot (arXiv:0912.0852) and by Kyrylyuk and Philipse (Prog. Colloid Polym. Sci., 2010, in press) that our theoretical result for the jamming density of a binary mixture of hard spheres (arXiv:0903.5099) apparently violates an upper bound that is obtained by considering the limit where the diameter ratio r = DA/DB goes to infinity. We believe that this apparent contradiction is the consequence of a misunderstanding, which we try to clarify here.