Related papers: Growing Dynamical Facilitation on Approaching the …
While the transformation of flowing liquids into rigid glasses is omnipresent, a complete understanding of vitrification remains elusive. Of the numerous approaches aimed at solving the glass transition problem, the Random First-Order…
One of the greatest challenges in contemporary condensed matter physics is to ascertain whether the formation of glasses from liquids is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While the thermodynamic paradigm has dominated…
We use Brownian dynamics simulations of a binary mixture of highly charged spherical colloidal particles to illustrate many of the implications of the Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory (PRA 40 1045 (1989)), which is the only…
Elucidating the nature of the glass transition has been the holy grail of condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics for several decades. A phenomenological aspect that makes glass formation a conceptually formidable problem is that…
The Random First Order Transition Theory (RFOT) predicts that transport proceeds by cooperative movement of particles in domains whose sizes increase as a liquid is compressed above a characteristic volume fraction, $\phi_d$. The rounded…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
Colloidal particles, which are ubiquitous, have become ideal testing grounds for the structural glass transition (SGT) theories. In these systems glassy behavior is manifested as the density of the particles is increased. Thus, soft…
The Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory of glasses provides a unified framework for explaining the observed correlations of the kinetic and thermodynamic behaviors of glass-forming liquids having a wide variety of chemical…
Extensive computer simulations are performed for a few model glass-forming liquids in both two and three dimensions to study their dynamics when a randomly chosen fraction of particles are frozen in their equilibrium positions. For all the…
The routine transformation of a liquid, as it is cooled rapidly, resulting in glass formation, is remarkably complex. A theoretical explanation of the dynamics associated with this process has remained one of the major unsolved problems in…
The steep increase of the relaxation time of glass forming liquids upon cooling is traditionally ascribed to an impending entropy crisis: since the system has "nowhere to go", dynamics must come to a halt. This classic argument, due to Adam…
Although several theories relate the steep slowdown of glass formers to increasing spatial correlations of some sort, standard static correlation functions show no evidence for this. We present results that reveal for the first time a…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
In supercooled liquids, dynamical facilitation refers to a phenomenon where microscopic motion begets further motion nearby, resulting in spatially heterogeneous dynamics. This is central to the glassy relaxation dynamics of such liquids,…
We use large scale computer simulations of a glass-forming liquid in which a fraction c of the particles has been permanently pinned. We find that the relaxation dynamics shows an exponential dependence on c. This result can be rationalized…
It is frequently assumed that in the limit of vanishing cooling rate, the glass transition phenomenon becomes a thermodynamic transition at a temperature $T_{K}$. However, with any finite cooling rate, the system falls out of equilibrium at…
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…
We study the role of elasticity-induced facilitation on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids by a coarse-grained two-dimensional model in which local relaxation events, taking place by thermal activation, can trigger new relaxations by…
The glass transition is a long-standing problem in physics. Identifying the structural origin of the transition may lead to the ultimate solution to the problem. Here, for the first time, we discover such a structural origin by proposing a…
A unified treatment of structural relaxation in a deeply supercooled glassy liquid is developed which extends the existing mode coupling theory (MCT) by incorporating the effects of activated events by using the concepts from the random…