Related papers: Perspective: The Glass Transition
In this contribution to the proceedings of the 29th Solvay Conference on Physics I will give an overview of some key challenges in our theoretical understanding of the rheology of glasses, focussing on (i) steady shear flow curves and their…
We study by molecular dynamics computer simulation a binary soft-sphere mixture that shows a pronounced decoupling of the species' long-time dynamics. Anomalous, power-law-like diffusion of small particles arises, that can be understood as…
A picture for thermodynamics of the glassy state is introduced. It assumes that one extra parameter, the effective temperature, is needed to describe the glassy state. This explains the classical paradoxes concerning the Ehrenfest relations…
We study the static as well as the glassy or dynamical transition in the mean-field $p$-state Potts glass. By numerical solution of the saddle point equations we investigate the static and the dynamical transition for all values of $p$ in…
The following properties are in the present literature associated with the behavior of super-cooled glass-forming liquids: faster than exponential growth of the relaxation time, dynamical heterogeneities, growing point-to-set correlation…
Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high. In these samples, the particles are roughly analogous to individual molecules in a traditional glass. This…
Unraveling the connections between microscopic structure, emergent physical properties, and slow dynamics has long been a challenge when studying the glass transition. The absence of clear visible structural order in amorphous…
Despite decades of research, it remains to be established whether the transformation of a liquid into a glass is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While observations of growing length scales are consistent with thermodynamic…
A liquid can form under cooling a glassy state either as a result of a continuous slowing down or by a first order polyamorphous phase transition. The second scenario has so far always been observed below the melting point where it…
The glassy dynamics of soft harmonic spheres is often mapped onto the dynamics of hard spheres by considering an effective diameter for the soft particles and therefore an effective packing fraction. While in this approach the thermal…
A comparative study is reported on the dynamics of a glass-forming epoxy resin when the glass transition is approached through different paths: cooling, compression, and polymerization. In particular, the influence of temperature, pressure…
Metallic glasses possess outstanding mechanical and physical properties, making them promising candidates for advanced structural and functional applications; however, the lack of understanding and control over their glass transition and…
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…
We review the approach to glasses based on the replica formalism. The replica approach presented here is a first principle's approach which aims at deriving the main glass properties from the microscopic Hamiltonian. In contrast to the old…
We show that finite size scaling techniques can be employed to study the glass transition. Our results follow from the postulate of a diverging correlation length at the glass transition whose physical manifestation is the presence of…
Despite the enormous theoretical and application interests, a fundamental understanding of the glassy dynamics remains elusive. The static properties of glassy and ordinary liquids are similar, but their dynamics are dramatically different.…
We consider the effects of quantum fluctuations in mean-field quantum spin-glass models with pairwise interactions. We examine the nature of the quantum glass transition at zero temperature in a transverse field. In models (such as the…
The remarkable strength of glasses is examined using the random first order transition theory of the glass transition. The theory predicts that strength depends on elastic modulus but also on the configurational energy frozen in when the…
A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…
A fundamental problem of glass transition is to explain the jump of heat capacity at the glass transition temperature $T_g$ without asserting the existence of a distinct solid glass phase. This problem is also common to other disordered…