Related papers: Energy landscapes and their relation to thermodyna…
As shown by early studies on mean-field models of the glass transition, the geometrical features of the energy landscape provide fundamental information on the dynamical transition at the Mode-Coupling temperature $T_d$. We show that active…
Traditionally, phase transitions are defined in the thermodynamic limit only. We propose a new formulation of equilibrium thermo-dynamics that is based entirely on mechanics and reflects just the {\em geometry and topology} of the N-body…
A microscopic understanding of low-temperature thermodynamics and its relation to dynamical features such as a fragile-to-strong crossover (FSC) remains a central challenge in glass physics. Using swap Monte Carlo combined with a full…
For a system consisting of active soft spheres in three dimensions, we study the transition from a fluid where overlaps between particles can only occur for a short time after a collision to a state where clusters of overlapping particles…
This paper proposes a theory that bridges classical analytical mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Its intent is to derive the evolution equations of a system from a stationarity principle for a suitably augmented Lagrangian…
Supercooled liquids are metastable states realized by suppressing crystallization below the melting temperature. While it is well established that their dynamics slow down dramatically and become spatially heterogeneous upon cooling, the…
When studying the thermodynamic properties of mesoscopic systems the most appropriate microcanonical entropy is the volume entropy, i.e. the logarithm of the volume of phase space enclosed by the hypersurface of constant energy. For systems…
We apply a recently proposed criterion for the existence of phase transitions, which is based on the properties of the saddles of the energy landscape, to a simplified model of a system with gravitational interactions, referred to as the…
The dynamics of colloidal particles in potential energy landscapes have mainly been investigated theoretically. In contrast, here we discuss the experimental realization of potential energy landscapes with the help of light fields and the…
Boltzmann's microcanonical entropy is the link between statistical physics and thermodynamics, forasmuch as the behavior of any thermodynamic quantity is directly related to the number of microscopic configurations. Accordingly, in this…
The stochastic thermodynamics provides a framework for the description of systems that are out of thermodynamic equilibrium. It is based on the assumption that the elementary constituents are acted by random forces that generate a…
A new point of view about the deep origin of thermodynamic phase transitions is sketched. The main idea is to link the appearance of phase transitions to some major topology change of suitable submanifolds of phase space instead of linking…
We study an ideal-gas-like model where the particles exchange energy stochastically, through energy conserving scattering processes, which take place if and only if at least one of the two particles has energy below a certain energy…
Computer simulations of a model glass-forming system are presented, which are particularly sensitive to the correlation between the dynamics and the topography of the potential energy landscape. This analysis clearly reveals that in the…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
Phase transitions in nuclei, small atomic clusters and self-gravitating systems demand the extension of thermo-statistics to ``Small'' systems. The main obstacle is the thermodynamic limit. It is shown how the original definition of the…
The effects of floppy modes in the thermodynamical properties of a system are studied. From thermodynamical arguments, we deduce that floppy modes are not at zero frequency and thus a modified Debye model is used to take into account this…
We show that thermodynamics can be formulated naturally from the intrinsic geometry of phase space alone-without postulating an ensemble, which instead emerges from the geometric structure itself. Within this formulation, phase transitions…
Bifurcation theory is the usual analytic approach to study the parameter space of a dynamical system. Despite the great power of prediction of these techniques, fundamental limitations appear during the study of a given problem. Nonlinear…
We present the study of the landscape structure of athermal soft spheres both as a function of the packing fraction and of the energy. We find that, on approaching the jamming transition, the number of different configurations available to…