Related papers: Thermorheological Complexity in Polymers and the P…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
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 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…
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…
The most puzzling aspect of the glass transition observed in laboratory is an apparent decoupling of dynamics from structure. In this paper we recount the implication of various theories of glass transition for the static correlation length…
We review the phenomena of dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming systems and its description within replica and mean-field theories of the glass transition.
The glass transition can simply be viewed as the point at which the viscosity of a structurally disordered liquid reaches 10^{13} Poise [1]. This definition is operational but it sidesteps fundamental controversies about the glass: Is the…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
We provide here a brief perspective on the glass transition field. It is an assessment, written from the point of view of theory, of where the field is and where it seems to be heading. We first give an overview of the main phenomenological…
The topic of the glass transition gives rise to a a wide diversity of views. It is, accordingly, characterized by a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical perspective. In this chapter, I provide some elements…
The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
Key to resolving the scientific challenge of the glass transition is to understand the origin of the massive increase in viscosity of liquids cooled below their melting temperature (avoiding crystallisation). A number of competing and often…
We study the glass transition by exploring a broad class of kinetic rules that can significantly modify the normal dynamics of super-cooled liquids, while maintaining thermal equilibrium. Beyond the usual dynamics of liquids, this class…
The principal theme of this paper is that anomalously slow, super-Arrhenius relaxations in glassy materials may be activated processes involving chains of molecular displacements. As pointed out in a preceding paper with A. Lemaitre, the…
Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses remains elusive since the glass transition itself is not fully understood, even in well studied examples of glass formers in two dimensions. In this context we demonstrate here: (i) a…
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…
In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or…
We show how dynamical heterogeneities in glass forming systems emerge as a consequence of the existence of dynamical constraints, and we offer an interpretation of the glass transition as an entropy crisis in trajectory space (space-time)…