Related papers: Theoretical perspective on the glass transition an…
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
The glass transition refers to the non-equilibrium process by which an equilibrium liquid is transformed to a non-equilibrium disordered solid, or vice versa. Associated response functions, such as heat capacities, are markedly different on…
We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…
We give a brief introduction to the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition, a theory which was proposed a while ago to describe the dynamics of supercooled liquids. After presenting the basic equations of the theory, we review some of…
We study the glass and jamming transition of finite-dimensional models of simple liquids: hard- spheres, harmonic spheres and more generally bounded pair potentials that modelize frictionless spheres in interaction. At finite temperature,…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
The idea that a thermodynamic glass transition of some sort underlies the observed glass formation has been highly debated since Kauzmann first stressed the hypothetical entropy crisis that could take place if one were able to equilibrate…
A current focus in studies of the glass transition is the role of dynamic heterogeneities. Although these efforts may clarify the origin of the spectacular change in properties of liquids approaching vitrification, we point out that a…
Ultrastable glasses, amorphous solids with exceptionally low-energy states and enhanced kinetic, thermodynamic and mechanical stability, have long been a subject of intense experimental interest. Over the past decade, their computational…
We divide glass and viscous liquid sciences into two major research areas, the first dealing with how to avoid crystals and so access the viscous liquid state, and the second dealing with how liquids behave when no crystals form. We review…
When we lower the temperature of a liquid, at some point we meet a first order phase transition to the crystal. Yet, under certain conditions it is possible to keep the system in its metastable phase and to avoid crystallization. In this…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
The glass transition is the most enduring grand-challenge problem in contemporary condensed matter physics. Here, we review the contribution of colloid experiments to our understanding of this problem. First, we briefly outline the success…
These lecture notes can be read in two ways. The first two Sections contain a review of the phenomenology of several physical systems with slow nonequilibrium dynamics. In the Conclusions we summarize the scenario derived from the solution…
Dynamical heterogeneities have been introduced in the context of the glass transition of molecular liquids and the lengthscale associated with them has been argued to be at the origin of the observed quasi-universal behaviour of glassy…
We review recent results from computer simulation studies of polymer glasses, from chain dynamics around the glass transition temperature Tg to the mechanical behaviour below Tg. These results clearly show that modern computer simulations…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
We compare dynamical heterogeneities in equilibrated supercooled liquids and in the nonequilibrium glassy state within the framework of the random first order transition theory. Fluctuating mobility generation and transport in the glass are…
The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…
We use dynamic light scattering and computer simulations to study equilibrium dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in concentrated suspensions of colloidal hard spheres. Our study covers an unprecedented density range and spans seven decades…