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Static granular packings are model hard-sphere glass formers. The nature of glass transition has remained a hotly debated issue. We review recent experimental progresses in using granular materials to study glass transitions. We focus on…
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,…
We describe a method to determine whether a material has isomorphs in its thermodynamic phase diagram. Isomorphs are state points for which various properties are invariant in reduced units. Such materials are commonly identified from…
Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…
We present a comparative ab initio computational study of sodium and lithium storage in amorphous (glassy) carbon (a-C) vs. graphite. Amorphous structures are obtained by fitting stochastically generated structures to a reference radial…
There are three kinds of solid states of matter that can exist in physical space: quasicrystalline (quasiperiodic), crystalline (periodic) and amorphous (aperiodic). Herein, we consider the degree of orientational order that develops upon…
Metallic glasses are formed by splat-cooling; this ensures that atomic motions are arrested before the latent heat of solidification can be extracted. Glass is defined as a higher disorder metastable state with arrested kinetics. Arrested…
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…
Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter remain subject to debate: Glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine…
Bulk metallic glass forms when liquid metal alloys solidify without crystalization. In the search for Iron-based bulk glass-forming alloys of the metal-metalloid type (Fe-B- and Fe-C-based), crystals based on the structural prototype C6Cr23…
We study a calcium aluminosilicate glass of composition (SiO2)0.60(Al2O3)0.10(CaO)0.30 by means of molecular dynamics. To this end, we conduct parallel simulations, following a consistent methodology, but using three different potentials.…
At ambient pressure, sodium, chlorine, and their only known compound NaCl, have well-understood crystal structures and chemical bonding. Sodium is a nearly-free-electron metal with the bcc structure. Chlorine is a molecular crystal,…
Celitement is a new type of cement that is based on hydraulic calcium-hydrosilicate (hCHS) that possesses a potential for minimizing the ratio C/S from above 3 in OPC down to 1, which significantly reduces the amount of CO$_2$ released…
We use ab initio simulations to study the static and dynamic properties of a sodium borosilicate liquid with composition 3Na_2O-B_2O_3-6SiO_2, i.e. a system that is the basis of many glass-forming materials. In particular we focus on the…
Glass stability (GS) indicates the glass reluctance or ability to crystallise upon heating; it can be characterised by several methods and parameters and is frequently used to retrieve glass-forming ability (GFA) of corresponding liquids as…
Silica-carbonate biomorphs are a class of emergent materials, i.e. composite microstructures made of nanometric carbonate crystallites surrounded by amorphous silica. They form via a co-precipitation process in an interplay between alkaline…
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for a system of $10^6$ particles, the response of a dense amorphous solid to the continuous expansion of its volume is investigated. We find that the spatially uniform glassy state becomes…
For nearly half a century the supersolid phase of matter has remained mysterious, not only eluding experimental observation, but also generating a great deal of controversy among theorists. Recent discovery of what is interpreted as a…
The existence of nanoscale ductility during the fracture of silicate glasses remains controversial. Here, based on molecular dynamics simulations coupled with topological constraint theory, we show that nano-ductility arises from the…
It is established theoretically that an ordered state with continuous symmetry is inherently unstable to arbitrarily small amounts of disorder [1, 2]. This principle is of central importance in a wide variety of condensed systems including…