Related papers: Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liqui…
Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic…
In the three-dimensional Heisenberg spin glass in a random field we study the properties of the inherent structures that are obtained by an instantaneous cooling from infinite temperature. For not too large field the density of states…
The smooth emergence of shear elasticity is an hallmark of the liquid to glass transition. In a liquid, viscous stresses arise from local structural rearrangements. In the solid, Eshelby has shown that stresses around an inclusion decay as…
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for a system of $10^6$ particles, the response of a dense amorphous solid to the continuous expansion of its volume is investigated. We find that the spatially uniform glassy state becomes…
All liquids are topologically disordered materials; however, the degree of disorder can vary as a result of internal fluctuations in structure and topology. These fluctuations depend on both the composition and temperature of the system.…
The onset of irreversible deformation in low-temperature amorphous solids is due to the accumulation of elementary events, consisting of spacially and temporally localized atomic rearrangements involving only a few tens of atoms. Recently,…
The dramatic slowdown of dynamics in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition remains one of the central unresolved problems in condensed matter physics. We review approaches that attribute this slowdown to growing thermodynamic…
Identifying heterogeneous structures in glasses --- such as localized soft spots --- and understanding structure-dynamics relations in these systems remain major scientific challenges. Here we derive an exact expression for the local…
We study by light microscopy a soft glass consisting of a compact arrangement of polydisperse elastic spheres. We show that its slow and non-stationary dynamics results from the unavoidable small fluctuations of temperature, which induce…
Plastic flow in amorphous solids is known to be carried by localized shear transformations (STs) which have been proposed to preferentially initiate from some defect units in the structure, akin to dislocations and point defects in…
We present the results of molecular dynamics computer simulations of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined between two parallel rough walls. These walls are realized by frozen amorphous configurations of the same liquid and therefore the…
We derive an extension of the mode coupling theory for the liquid-glass transition to a class of models of confined fluids, where the fluid particles evolve in a disordered array of interaction sites. We find that the corresponding…
We unveil the existence of non-affinely rearranging regions in the inherent structures (IS) of supercooled liquids by numerical simulations of two- and three-dimensional model glass formers subject to static shear deformations combined with…
The understanding of glassy dynamics above the devitrification temperature of a glass remains poorly understood. Here, we use real-time AFM imaging to build a spatio-temporal map of the relaxation dynamics of a highly stable glass into its…
Colloidal gel networks are disordered elastic solids that can form even in extremely dilute particle suspensions. With interaction strengths comparable to the thermal energy, their stress-bearing network can locally restructure via breaking…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
We study the role of elasticity-induced facilitation on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids by a coarse-grained two-dimensional model in which local relaxation events, taking place by thermal activation, can trigger new relaxations by…
Nearly all glass forming liquids display secondary relaxations, dynamical modes seemingly distinct from the primary alpha relaxations. We show that accounting for driving force fluctuations and the diversity of reconfiguring shapes in the…
We study the rheology of amorphous solids in the limit of negligible thermal fluctuations. On the basis of general arguments, the flow curve is shown to result from an interplay between the time scales of the macroscopic driving and the…
Liquids relax extremely slowly upon approaching the glass state. One explanation is that an entropy crisis, due to the rarefaction of available states, makes it increasingly arduous to reach equilibrium in that regime. Validating this…