Related papers: Why is Understanding Glassy Polymer Mechanics So D…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…
Experiments performed on a wide range of glassy materials display many interesting phenomena, such as aging behavior. In recent years, a large body of experiments probed this nonequilibrium glassy dynamics through elaborate protocols, in…
The study of spin-glass dynamics, long considered the paradigmatic complex system, has reached important milestones. The availability of single crystals has allowed the experimental measurement of spin-glass coherence lengths of almost…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…
Nanocrystalline metals contain a large fraction of high-energy grain boundaries, which may be considered as glassy phases. Consequently, with decreasing grain size, a crossover in the deformation behaviour of nanocrystals to that of…
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined in a narrow pore. We find that the average dynamics is strongly influenced by the confinement in that time…
We report on the results of a molecular dynamics simulation study of binodal glassy systems, formed in the process of isochoric rapid quenching from a high-temperature fluid phase. The transition to vitreous state occurs due to concurrent…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the effects of deformation on the segmental dynamics in an aging polymer glass. Individual particle trajectories are decomposed into a series of discontinuous hops, from which we obtain…
By characterizing the dynamics of idealized lattice models with a tunable kinetic constraint, we explore the different ways in which dynamical facilitation manifests itself within the local dynamics of glassy materials. Dynamical…
We introduce a family of local models of dynamics based on ``word problems'' from computer science and group theory, for which we can place rigorous lower bounds on relaxation timescales. These models can be regarded either as random…
We study the glass formation in two- and three-dimensional Ising and Heisenberg spin systems subject to competing interactions and uniaxial anisotropy with a mean-field approach. In three dimensions, for sufficiently strong anisotropy the…
The Langevin Equation for cooperative dynamics represents the dynamics of polymer melts with chains of increasing degree of polymerization, covering the full range of behavior from the unentangled to the entangled regime. This equation…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
Glasses are mechanically rigid, still undergo structural relaxation which changes their properties and affects potential technological applications. Understanding the underlying physical processes is a problem of broad theoretical and…
In this paper, we review the general features of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of spin glasses. We use this example as a guideline for a brief description of glassy dynamics in other disordered systems like structural and polymer glasses,…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
Dynamic heterogeneity is now recognised as a central aspect of structural relaxation in disordered materials with slow dynamics, and was the focus of intense research in the last decade. Here we describe how initial, indirect observations…
An instructive and apparently simple model of fully-coupled rotators, the so-called Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF) model, together with a generalized version with variable interaction range, have revealed a very complex out-of-equilibrium…
The dynamics of polymer decompression, i.e., a process from compressed, compact state to the relaxed swoll en conformation, can be formally described as a {\it nonlinear diffusion}. We discuss here two basic examples: (i) the expansion, or…
Understanding how entanglements affect the behaviour of polymeric complex fluids is an open challenge in many fields. To elucidate the nature and consequence of entanglements in dense polymer solutions, we propose a novel method: a…