  We construct the densest known two-dimensional packings of superdisks in the
plane whose shapes are defined by |x^(2p) + y^(2p)| <= 1, which contains both
convex-shaped particles (p > 0.5, with the circular-disk case p = 1) and
concave-shaped particles (0 < p < 0.5). The packings of the convex cases with p
1 generated by a recently developed event-driven molecular dynamics (MD)
simulation algorithm [Donev, Torquato and Stillinger, J. Comput. Phys. 202
(2005) 737] suggest exact constructions of the densest known packings. We find
that the packing density (covering fraction of the particles) increases
dramatically as the particle shape moves away from the "circular-disk" point (p
= 1). In particular, we find that the maximal packing densities of superdisks
for certain p 6 = 1 are achieved by one of the two families of Bravais lattice
packings, which provides additional numerical evidence for Minkowski's
conjecture concerning the critical determinant of the region occupied by a
superdisk. Moreover, our analysis on the generated packings reveals that the
broken rotational symmetry of superdisks influences the packing characteristics
in a non-trivial way. We also propose an analytical method to construct dense
packings of concave superdisks based on our observations of the structural
properties of packings of convex superdisks.
