Related papers: Liquids more stable than crystals
The competition between liquid and solid states of strongly correlated electron systems occurs in a novel way in a strong magnetic field. The fact that certain Landau level filling factors are especially favorable for the formation of…
A general thermodynamic argument shows that multi-component matter in full chemical equilibrium, with uniform entropy per baryon, is generally stably stratified. This is particularly relevant for neutron stars, in which the effects of…
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…
The persistent problem posed by the glass transition is to develop a general atomic level description of a solidification process that is not associated with any change in the symmetry of the atomic structure. The answer proposed in this…
Due to nonuniform aggregation in liquid state, from the thermodynamic point of view any glass-forming liquid in the vicinity of the liquid-to-solid phase transition temperature, irrespective of its actual chemical composition, shall be…
A system is glassy when the observation time is much smaller than the equilibration time. A unifying thermodynamic picture of the glassy state is presented. Slow configurational modes are in quasi-equilibrium at an effective temperature. It…
The very nature of glass is somewhat mysterious: while relaxation times in glasses are of sufficient magnitude that large-scale motion on the atomic level is essentially as slow as it is in the crystalline state, the structure of glass…
Our understanding of supercooled liquids and glasses has lagged significantly behind that of simple liquids and crystalline solids. This is in part due to the many possibly relevant degrees of freedom that are present due to the disorder…
This perspective article reviews arguments that glass-forming liquids are different from those of standard liquid-state theory, which typically have a viscosity in the mPa$\cdot$s range and relaxation times of order picoseconds. These…
An equilibrated model glass-forming liquid is studied by mapping successive configurations produced by molecular dynamics simulation onto a time series of inherent structures (local minima in the potential energy). Using this ``inherent…
Condensed matter is thermodynamically unstable in a vacuum. That is what thermodynamics tells us through the relation showing that condensed matter at temperatures above absolute zero always has non-zero vapour pressure. This instability…
The origin of water's anomalous behavior remains a central open problem in the physical sciences and is often attributed to a liquid-liquid transition (LLT) between high- and low-density liquid states deep in the supercooled regime.…
According to the mosaic scenario, relaxation in supercooled liquids is ruled by two competing mechanisms: surface tension, opposing the creation of local excitations, and entropy, providing the drive to the configurational rearrangement of…
Using computer simulations, we establish that the structure of a supercooled binary atomic liquid mixture consists of common neighbour structures similar to those found in the equilibrium crystal phase, a Laves structure. Despite the large…
The thermodynamics of H/{\alpha}-Zr solid solution and zirconium hydride phases were studied using density functional theory. Disorder in {\zeta}, {\gamma} and {\delta} hydrides and solid solutions were modelled using a statistically…
We develop a thermodynamic description of particles held at a fixed surface potential. This system is of particular interest in view of the continuing controversy over the possibility of a fluid-fluid phase separation in aqueous colloidal…
Water famously expands upon freezing, foreshadowed by a negative coefficient of expansion of the liquid at temperatures close to its freezing temperature. These behaviors, and many others, reflect the energetic preference for local…
Glass-forming liquids grow dramatically sluggish upon cooling. This slowdown has long been thought to be accompanied by a growing correlation length. Characteristic dynamical and static length scales, however, have been observed to grow at…
Ordered phases of matter, such as solids, ferromagnets, superfluids, or quantum topological order, typically only exist at low temperatures. Despite this conventional wisdom, we present explicit local models in which all such phases persist…
The aim of this paper is to discuss some basic notions regarding generic glass forming systems composed of particles interacting via soft potentials. Excluding explicitly hard-core interaction we discuss the so called `glass transition' in…