Related papers: Geometric interpretation of pre-vitrification in h…
We study theoretically and numerically the microscopic cause of the mechanical stability of hard sphere glasses near their maximum packing. We show that, after coarse-graining over time, the hard sphere interaction can be described by an…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
The reformulation of the mode-coupling theory (MCT) of the liquid-glass transition which incorporates the element of metastability is applied to the hard-sphere system. It is shown that the glass transition in this system is not a sharp one…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
While various structural and dynamical precursors to vitrification have been identified, a predictive and quantitative description of how subtle changes at the microscopic scale give rise to the steep growth in macroscopic viscosity is…
Using molecular dynamics calculations and the Voronoi tessellation, we study the evolution of the local structure of a soft-sphere glass versus temperature starting from the liquid phase at different quenching rates. This study is done for…
We obtain analytic expressions for the time correlation functions of a liquid of spherical particles, exact in the limit of high dimensions $d$. The derivation is long but straightforward: a dynamic virial expansion for which only the first…
We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are…
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…
Recent literature indicates that attractive interactions between particles of a dense liquid play a secondary role in determining its bulk mechanical properties. Here we show that, in contrast with their apparent unimportance to the bulk…
Extensive molecular dynamics simulations show that a short-range central potential, suited to model C60, undergoes a high temperature transition to a glassy phase characterized by the positional disorder of the constituent particles.…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
We use molecular dynamics to investigate the glass transition occurring at large volume fraction, phi, and low temperature, T, in assemblies of soft repulsive particles. We find that equilibrium dynamics in the (phi, T) plane obey a form of…
There exists a variety of theories of the glass transition and many more numerical models. But because the models need built-in complexity to prevent crystallization, comparisons with theory can be difficult. We study the dynamics of a…
Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…
The phase behavior of helical packings of thermoresponsive microspheres inside glass capillaries is studied as a function of volume fraction. Stable packings with long-range orientational order appear to evolve abruptly to disordered states…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…
In previous work the parameter of glassiness was introduced to distinguish between a liquid and a glass, using a formal analogy with the quantum Bose system. The glassiness is defined in such a way that it is unity in a frozen system and…
This paper is the fifth in a series exploring the physical consequences of the solidity of glass-forming liquids. Paper IV proposed a model where the density field is described by a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation of the…