The number of structures compatible with any correlation function

A two-point correlation function provides a crucial yet an incomplete characterization of a microstructure because distinctly different microstructures may have the same correlation function. We address here the microstructural degeneracy question: What is the number of microstructures compatible with a specified correlation function? We compute this degeneracy in the framework of reconstruction methods, which enables us to map the problem to the determination of ground-state degeneracies. Since the configuration space of a reconstruction problem is a hypercube on which a Hamming distance is defined, we can calculate analytically the energy profile of any reconstruction problem, corresponding to the average energy of all microstructures at a given Hamming distance from a ground state. The steepness of the energy profile is a measure of the roughness of the energy landscape associated with the reconstruction problem, which can be used as a proxy for the ground-state degeneracy. The relationship between this roughness metric and the ground-state degeneracy is calibrated using a Monte Carlo algorithm for determining the ground-state degeneracy of a variety of microstructures (e.g., realizations of hard disks and Poisson point processes at various densities), as well as with microstructures with a known degeneracy (e.g., single disks of various sizes and a particular crystalline microstructure). We show that our results can be expressed in terms of the information content of the two-point correlation functions. From this perspective, the a priori condition for a reconstruction to be accurate is that the information content, expressed in bits, should be comparable to the number of pixels in the unknown microstructure. We provide a formula to calculate the information content of any two-point correlation function, which makes our results directly applicable by other researchers in the field.