Related papers: On the surface of glasses
Several experiments on molecular and metallic glasses have shown that the ability of vapor deposition to produce ultrastable glasses is correlated with their structural and thermodynamic properties. Here we investigate the vapor deposition…
Despite their technological relevance, a full microscopic understanding of glasses is still lacking. This applies even more to their surfaces whose properties largely differ from that of the bulk material. Here, we experimentally…
The slowing down of molecular dynamics when approaching the glass transition generally proceeds much stronger than expected for thermally activated motions. This strange phenomenon can be formally ascribed to a temperature-dependent…
Understanding the physics of glass formation remains one of the major unsolved challenges of condensed matter science. As a material solidifies into a glass, it exhibits a spectacular slowdown of the dynamics upon cooling or compression,…
While the transformation of flowing liquids into rigid glasses is omnipresent, a complete understanding of vitrification remains elusive. Of the numerous approaches aimed at solving the glass transition problem, the Random First-Order…
Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbors and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape containing multiple minima (basins) separated by high barriers.…
We introduce a three-dimensional lattice gas model to study the glass transition. In this model the interactions come from the excluded volume and particles have five arms with an asymmetrical shape, which results in geometric frustration…
In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or…
An alternative scenario for the glass transition based on the cooperative nature of nucleation processes and the role of entropic effects is presented. The new ingredient is to relate the dissipation during the relaxation process to the…
We have studied the liquid-like response of the surface of vapour-deposited glassy films of polystyrene to the introduction of gold nanoparticles on the surface. The build-up of polymer material was measured as a function of time and…
We use computer simulations to investigate the static properties of a simple glass-forming fluid in which the positions of a finite fraction of the particles has been frozen in. By probing the equilibrium distribution of the overlap between…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
We discuss some generic features of the dynamics of glass-forming liquids close to the glass transition singularity of the idealized mode-coupling theory (MCT). The analysis is based on a recent model by one of the authors for the…
The enhancement of mobility at the surface of an amorphous alloy is studied using a combination of molecular dynamic simulations and normal mode analysis of the non-uniform distribution of Debye-Waller factors. The increased mobility at the…
The barriers between metastable states near the glass transition of a random heteropolymer are studied using replicas by describing inhomogeneous states. The instanton solution for a replica space free energy functional is found numerically…
Single particle dynamics of water confined in a nanopore is studied through Computer Molecular Dynamics. The pore is modeled to represent the average properties of a pore of Vycor glass. Dynamics is analyzed at different hydration levels…
Swap algorithms can shift the glass transition to lower temperatures, a recent unexplained observation constraining the nature of this phenomenon. Here we show that swap dynamic is governed by an effective potential describing both particle…
We show that a glass transition, signaled by a peak in the specific heat vs. temperature, can occur because a glassy system that shows no signs of aging progresses so slowly through the energy landscape that the time needed to obtain an…
Orientational relaxation (OR) in a viscous, glassy liquid is investigated by carrying out extensive NPT molecular dynamics simulations of isolated ellipsoids in a glass forming binary mixture. Near the glass transition, the OR occurs mainly…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…