Related papers: Perspective: The Glass Transition
We numerically study the potential energy landscape of a fragile glassy system and find that the dynamic crossover corresponding to the glass transition is actually the effect of an underlying geometric transition caused by a qualitative…
For hard ellipsoids of revolution we calculate the phase diagram for the idealized glass transition. Our equations cover the glass physics in the full phase space, for all packing fractions and all aspect ratios X$_0$. With increasing…
In 1995, the Nobel Price winner P.W. Anderson made the following remarkable statement: The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and glass transition. Although…
We analyse numerically thermal fluctuations of the static overlap between equilibrium configurations in a glass-forming liquid approaching the glass transition. We find that the emergence of slow dynamics near the onset temperature…
Understanding the physics of glass formation remains one of the major unsolved challenges of condensed matter science. As a material solidifies into a glass, it exhibits a spectacular slowdown of the dynamics upon cooling or compression,…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
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…
This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…
It has been recently shown that one can understand the Prigogine-Defay ratio at the glass transition in terms of freezing into one of the many inherent states of the undercooled liquid. In the present paper, the treatment is extended to the…
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…
The nature of the glass transition is theoretically understood in the mean-field limit of infinite spatial dimensions, but the problem remains totally open in physical dimensions. Nontrivial finite-dimensional fluctuations are hard to…
Whether the glass transition is caused by an underlying singularity or is a purely kinetic phenomenon is a significant outstanding question. Studying an atomistic glass former, we introduce a sampling method to access temperatures…
We propose a simple theory for the dynamics of model glass-forming fluids, which should be solvable using a mean-field-like approach. The theory is based on transparent physical assumptions, which can be tested in computer simulations. The…
The statistical mechanics of simple glass forming systems in 2 dimensions is worked out. The glass disorder is encoded via a Voronoi tessellation, and the statistical mechanics is performed directly in this encoding. The theory provides,…
The glass transition is described in terms of thermally activated local structural rearrangements, the secondary relaxations of the glass phase. The interaction between these secondary relaxations leads to a much faster and much more…
Aspects of the dynamical glass transition are considered within a mean field spin glass model. At the dynamical transition the the system condenses in a state of lower entropy. The difference, the information entropy or complexity, is…
Despite decades of work, gaining a first-principle understanding of amorphous materials remains an extremely challenging problem. However, recent theoretical breakthroughs have led to the formulation of an exact solution in the mean-field…
Many properties of solids such as the glass state are commonly treated as nonequilibrium phenomena, which involve many conceptual difficulties. However, few studies have addressed the problem of understanding equilibrium itself. Equilibrium…
We use computer simulations to investigate the static properties of a simple glass-forming fluid in which the positions of a finite fraction of the particles has been frozen in. By probing the equilibrium distribution of the overlap between…
The glass transition plays a central role in nature as well as in industry, ranging from biological systems such as proteins and DNA to polymers and metals. Yet the fundamental understanding of the glass transition which is a prerequisite…