Related papers: Liquids more stable than crystals
Glass-to-glass and liquid-to-liquid phase transitions are observed in bulk and confined water, with or without applied pressure. They result from the competition of two liquid phases separated by an enthalpy difference depending on…
We show that introducing long-range Coulomb interactions immediately lifts the massive ground state degeneracy induced by geometric frustration for electrons on quarter-filled triangular lattices in the classical limit. Important…
Glass-forming liquids have only a modest tendency to crystallize and hence their dynamics can be studied even below the melting temperature. The relaxation dynamics of most of these liquids shows at a temperature $T_c$, somewhat above the…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
Liquids in systems with spherically symmetric interactions are not thermodynamically stable when the range of the attraction is reduced sufficiently. However, these metastable liquids have lifetimes long enough that they are readily…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
In supercooled liquids, at a temperature between the glass transition temperature Tg and the melting point Tm, thermodynamic properties remain continuous, while dynamic behavior exhibits anomalies. The origin of such thermodynamics-dynamic…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
We numerically study a nondisordered lattice spin system with a first order liquid-crystal transition, as a model for supercooled liquids and glasses. Below the melting temperature the system can be kept in the metastable liquid phase, and…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
We examine the physical processes which are involved in the formation and stability of the anomalous states of water reported recently. The initial step of adding a small amount of ionic compound XY to pure water leads to the formation of…
Metallic glass is a frozen liquid with structural disorder that retains degenerate free energy without spontaneous symmetry breaking to become a solid. For over half a century, this puzzling structure has raised fundamental questions about…
Using experiments, theory and simulations, we show that the arrested state observed in a colloidal clay at intermediate concentrations is stabilized by the screened Coulomb repulsion (Wigner glass). Dilution experiments allow us to…
Quantum droplets are small clusters of atoms self-bound by the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Here we report on the observation of a novel type of droplets, solely stabilized by contact interactions in a mixture of two…
Recent imaging experiments show a surprisingly robust regime of liquid-solid phase coexistence in a 2D electron system near the quantum melting/freezing transition, with the two phases mixed in mesoscopic domains. Strikingly, the…
We apply microcanonical ensemble considerations to suggest that, whenever it may thermalize, a general disorder-free many-body Hamiltonian of a typical atomic system has solid-like eigenstates at low energies and fluid-type (and gaseous,…
A model based on the existence of two different competing local structures in water is described. It is shown that it can explain the transition between fragile and strong behavior that supercooled water has around 220 K. The high…
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…
Faced with the Kauzmann paradox, glasses have always been a puzzle for condensed matter theorists. We show that in a new picture of condensed matter, which takes into account the coherent interaction mechanisms of QED, glasses are nothing…