Related papers: Local structural excitations in model glasses
The dramatic slowdown of dynamics in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition remains one of the central unresolved problems in condensed matter physics. We review approaches that attribute this slowdown to growing thermodynamic…
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,…
The process of finding activated transitions in localized spin systems with continuous degrees of freedom is developed based on a magnetic variant of the Activation-Relaxation Technique (mART). In addition to the description of the method…
The properties of higher-index saddle points have been invoked in recent theories of the dynamics of supercooled liquids. Here we examine in detail a mapping of configurations to saddle points using minimization of $|\nabla E|^2$, which has…
The quantum excitations in glasses have long presented a set of puzzles for condensed matter physicists. A common view is that they are largely disordered analogs of elementary excitations in crystals, supplemented by two level systems…
Glassy solids exhibit a wide variety of generic thermomechanical properties, ranging from universal anomalous specific heat at cryogenic temperatures to nonlinear plastic yielding and failure under external driving forces, which…
We study shear yielding and steady state flow of glassy materials with molecular dynamics simulations of two standard models: amorphous polymers and bidisperse Lennard-Jones glasses. For a fixed strain rate, the maximum shear yield stress…
Amorphous solids or glasses are known to exhibit stretched-exponential decay over broad time intervals in several of their macroscopic observables: intermediate scattering function, dielectric relaxation modulus, time-elastic modulus etc.…
In this work we calculate the local elastic moduli in a weakly polydisperse 2DLennard-Jones glass undergoing a quasistatic shear deformation at zero temperature. The numerical method uses coarse grained microscopic expressions for the…
The effect of cyclic loading on relaxation dynamics and mechanical properties of metallic glasses is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the Kob-Andersen three-dimensional binary mixture rapidly cooled across the glass…
Within the mode-coupling theory for ideal glass transitions, an analysis for the correlation functions of glass-forming systems for states near higher-order glass-transition singularities is presented. It is shown that the solutions of the…
We study the structure of inactive states in a prototypical model glass, the Kob-Andersen binary Lennard-Jones mixture. These inactive states are obtained by transition path sampling and are at dynamical phase coexistence with an active…
We report a detailed study of the stationary points (zero-force points) of the potential energy surface (PES) of a model structural glassformer. We compare stationary points found with two different algorithms (eigenvector following and…
We present evidence from computer simulation that the slowdown of relaxation of a standard Lennard-Jones glass-forming liquid and that of its reduction to a model with truncated pair potentials without attractive tails is quantitatively and…
While diffusion in crystalline solids is quantitatively understood through defect-mediated atomic hops, no comparable quantitative framework exists for glasses. In these systems, the origin of large diffusion activation energies remains…
There have been some interesting recent advances in understanding the notion of mechanical disorder in structural glasses and the statistical mechanics of these systems' low-energy excitations. Here we contribute to these advances by…
Amorphous materials such as metallic, polymeric, and colloidal glasses, exhibit complex preparation-dependent mechanical response to applied shear. We perform numerical simulations to investigate the mechanical response of binary…
We image local structural rearrangements in soft colloidal glasses under small periodic perturbations induced by thermal cycling. Local structural entropy $S_{2}$ positively correlates with observed rearrangements in colloidal glasses. The…
The description of activated relaxation of glassy systems in the multidimensional configurational space is a long-standing open problem. We develop a phenomenological description of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a model with a rough…
The dramatic slowdown of glass-forming liquids has been variously linked to increasing dynamic and static correlation lengths. Yet, empirical evidence is insufficient to decide among competing theories. The random first order theory (RFOT)…