Related papers: Avalanches mediate crystallization in a hard-spher…
The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
We report avalanche criticality of thermal relaxation in glassy systems after a rapid quench by molecular simulation. Our analysis of the energy landscape and the scaling reveals that particle rearrangement is critical. The critical…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
Crystal plasticity occurs by deformation bursts due to the avalanche-like motion of dislocations. Here we perform extensive numerical simulations of a three-dimensional dislocation dynamics model under quasistatic stress-controlled loading.…
In this chapter, we discuss avalanches in glasses and disordered systems, and the macroscopic dynamical behavior that they mediate. We briefly review three classes of systems where avalanches are observed: depinning transition of disordered…
We investigate avalanches associated with plastic rearrangements and the nature of structural change in the prototypical strong glass, silica, computationally. Although qualitative aspects of yielding in silica are similar to other glasses,…
The discovery of ultrastable glasses has raised novel challenges about glassy systems. Recent experiments studied the macroscopic devitrification of ultrastable glasses into liquids upon heating but lacked microscopic resolution. We use…
Crystal plasticity is mediated through dislocations, which form knotted configurations in a complex energy landscape. Once they disentangle and move, they may also be impeded by permanent obstacles with finite energy barriers or frustrating…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
Crystallization and vitrification are two different routes to form a solid. Normally these two processes suppress each other, with the glass transition preventing crystallization at high density (or low temperature). This is even true for…
Using numerical simulations we examine colloids with a long-range Coulomb interaction confined in a two-dimensional trough potential undergoing dynamical compression. As the depth of the confining well is increased, the colloids move via…
We identify the pattern of microscopic dynamical relaxation for a two dimensional glass forming liquid. On short timescales, bursts of irreversible particle motion, called cage jumps, aggregate into clusters. On larger time scales, clusters…
The dynamical facilitation scenario, by which localized relaxation events promote nearby relaxation events in an avalanching process, has been suggested as the key mechanism connecting the microscopic and the macroscopic dynamics of…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
We simulate a strongly size-disperse hard-sphere fluid confined between two parallel, hard walls. We find that confinement induces crystallization into n-layered hexagonal lattices and a novel honeycomb-shaped structure, facilitated by…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
Inelastic deformation of metallic glasses occurs via slip events with avalanche dynamics similar to those of earthquakes. For the first time in these materials, measurements have been obtained with sufficiently high temporal resolution to…
Under applied shear strain, granular and amorphous materials deform via particle rearrangements, which can be small and localized or organized into system-spanning avalanches. While the statistical properties of avalanches under…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…