Related papers: Metabasins - a State Space Aggregation for highly …

While diffusion in crystalline solids is quantitatively understood through defect-mediated atomic hops, no comparable quantitative framework exists for glasses. In these systems, the origin of large diffusion activation energies remains…

We address the problem of the so-called ``granular gases'', i.e. gases of massive particles in rapid movement undergoing inelastic collisions. We introduce a class of models of driven granular gases for which the stationary state is the…

Depth, number, and shape of the basins of the potential energy landscape are the key ingredients of the inherent structure thermodynamic formalism introduced by Stillinger and Weber [F. H. Stillinger and T. A. Weber, Phys. Rev. A 25, 978…

Using the inherent structure formalism originally proposed by Stillinger and Weber [Phys. Rev. A 25, 978 (1982)], we generalize the thermodynamics of an energy landscape that has an ideal glass transition and derive the consequences for its…

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 many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…

The glass transition is considered within two toys models, a mean field spin glass and a directed polymer in a correlated random potential. In the spin glass model there occurs a dynamical transition, where the system condenses in a state…

All ground states and low-lying excitations of a +/- I Ising spin glass model on a cubic 4 x 4 x 4 lattice with periodical boundary conditions were calculated using a method of combinatorical optimization. The structure of states in the…

This Ph.D. thesis is divided in two parts. The first one concerns the equilibrium properties of glassy systems. Some aspects of the phenomenology of glasses and of theories attempting to describe them are reviewed in chapter 1. A study of…

We study the distribution of overlaps of glassy minima, taking proper care of residual symmetries of the system. Ensembles of locally stable, low lying glassy states are efficiently generated by rapid cooling from the liquid phase which has…

Systems with a complex dynamics like glasses or models of biological evolution are often pictured in terms of complex landscapes, with a large number of possible collective states. We show on the example of a stochastic spin model with…

For the discrete random field Curie-Weiss models, the infinite volume Gibbs states and metastates have been investigated and determined for specific instances of random external fields. In general, there are not many examples in the…

The Takayasu aggregation model is a paradigmatic model of aggregation with mass injection, known to exhibit a power law distribution of mass over a range which grows in time. Working in one dimension we find that the mass profile in…

Self-assembly processes provide the means to achieve scalable and versatile metamaterials by "bottom-up" fabrication. Despite their enormous potential, especially as a platform for energy materials, self-assembled metamaterials are often…

Amorphous materials exhibit structural heterogeneities that relax only on long timescales. Using machine learning techniques, we construct a Markov state model (MSM) for model glass formers that coarse-grains the dynamics into a…

We define restricted ensembles, called pico-canonical ensembles, for a statistical-mechanical description of the metastable and glassy phases. In this approach, time-evolution is Markovian, with temperature dependent rates. Below a…

The state-following technique allows the study of metastable glassy states under external perturbations. Here we show how this construction can be used to study the behavior of glassy states of Hard Spheres in infinite dimensions under…

We present a general framework to study the metastability of random perturbations of dynamical systems. It integrates techniques from the theory of Markov processes, in particular the resolvent approach to metastability, with the spectral…

Diffusive operations, which mix the populations of different elements of phase space, can irreversibly transform a given initial state into any of a spectrum of different states from which no further energy can be extracted through…

The crossing of a transition state in a multidimensional reactive system is mediated by invariant geometric objects in phase space: An invariant hyper-sphere that represents the transition state itself and invariant hyper-cylinders that…