Related papers: The replica method in liquid theory: from the basi…
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…
Glass-forming liquids have been extensively studied in recent decades, but there is still no theory that fully describes these systems, and the diversity of treatments is in itself a barrier to understanding. Here we introduce a new simple…
One dramatic feature of network liquids is the emergence at low temperatures and high pressures of polyamorphism, where multiple distinct liquid phases are accessed in a single material. Polyamorphism can arise from the competition between…
We provide a compact derivation of the static and dynamic equations for infinite-dimensional particle systems in the liquid and glass phases. The static derivation is based on the introduction of an "auxiliary" disorder and the use of the…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…
We review the recently proposed elastic approach to glass transition. This approach is based on a simple and a physically transparent idea of elastic interactions between local relaxation events in a liquid. Central to this picture is the…
We compute the temperature-dependent barrier for alpha-relaxations in several liquids, without adjustable parameters, using experimentally determined elastic, structural, and calorimetric data. We employ the random first order…
At the mean-field level, on fully connected lattices, several disordered spin models have been shown to belong to the universality class of "structural glasses", with a "random first-order transition" (RFOT) characterized by a discontinuous…
Framing the glass formation within standard statistical mechanics is an outstanding problem of condensed matter theory. To provide new insight, we investigate the structural properties of the Lennard-Jones fluid in the very-low temperature…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…
Liquid-liquid transition is an intriguing phenomenon in which a liquid transforms into another liquid via the first-order transition. For molecular liquids, however, it always takes place in a supercooled liquid state metastable against…
This work presents a comparative study of the best models available to describe granular fluids in order to investigate the extent to which it makes sense to speak about a liquid-gas transition in a system of particles that present no…
The cage effect is widely accepted as the basic microscopic mechanism underlying the physics of supercooled liquids in contrast with usual liquids which are governed by molecular interactions only. In this work we implement a new toy model…
A molecular theory of the glass transition of network forming liquids is developed using a combination of self-consistent phonon and liquid state approaches. Both the dynamical transition and the entropy crisis characteristic of random…
We discuss walking behavior in gauge theories and weak first-order phase transitions in statistical physics. Despite appearing in very different systems (QCD below the conformal window, the Potts model, deconfined criticality) these two…
We study the partition-function zeros in mean-field spin-glass models. We show that the replica method is useful to find the locations of zeros in a complex parameter plane. For the random energy model, we obtain the phase diagram in the…
Liquid water is fundamentally important, and its accurate computer simulation has been the driving force for myriad methodological developments. Ab initio molecular dynamics with forces obtained from density functional theory (DFT) is now a…
We discuss some generic features of the dynamics of glass-forming liquids close to the glass transition singularity of the idealized mode-coupling theory (MCT). The analysis is based on a recent model by one of the authors for the…
Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic…