Related papers: Exploring structural inhomogeneities in glasses du…

We propose and numerically implement a local probe of the static self-induced heterogeneity characterizing glass-forming liquids. The method relies on the equilibrium statistics of the overlap between pairs of configurations measured in…

The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving…

Active-elastic instabilities are common phenomena in the natural world which have the aspect of sudden mechanical morphings. Frequently, the driving force of the instability mechanisms has a chemo-mechanical nature which makes these kind of…

Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…

We investigate structural and dynamical properties of moderately polydisperse emulsions across an extended range of droplet volume fractions phgr, encompassing fluid and glassy states up to jamming. Combining experiments and simulations, we…

We demonstrate that a fluidized bed of hard spheres during defluidization displays properties associated with formation of a glass. The final state is rate dependent, and as this state is approached, the bed exhibits heterogeneity with…

Many systems, including polymers and molecular liquids, when adequately cooled and/or compressed, solidify into a disordered solid, i.e., a glass. The~transition is not abrupt, featuring progressive decrease of the microscopic mobility and…

Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…

Materials typically fail under complex stress states, essentially involving dilatational (volumetric) components that eventually lead to material decohesion/separation. It is therefore important to understand dilatational irreversible…

Glasses behave as solids on experimental time scales due to their slow relaxation. Growing dynamic length scales due to cooperative motion of particles are believed to be central to this slow response. For quiescent glasses, however, the…

Amorphous solids lack long-range order. Therefore identifying structural defects -- akin to dislocations in crystalline solids -- that carry plastic flow in these systems remains a daunting challenge. By comparing many different structural…

Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to examine the dynamic response of amorphous solids to oscillatory shear at finite temperatures. The data were collected from a poorly annealed binary glass, which was deformed periodically in…

We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…

Ultrastable glasses, amorphous solids with exceptionally low-energy states and enhanced kinetic, thermodynamic and mechanical stability, have long been a subject of intense experimental interest. Over the past decade, their computational…

The evolution of porous structure, potential energy and local density in binary glasses under oscillatory shear deformation is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. The porous glasses were initially prepared via a rapid thermal…

In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…

Experimentally resolving atomic-scale structural changes of a deformed glass remains challenging owing to the disordered nature of glass structure. Here, we show that the structural anisotropy emerges as a general hallmark for different…

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…

Amorphous solids, such as glasses, have complex responses to deformations, with significant consequences in material design and applications. In this respect two intertwined aspects are important: stability and reversibility. It is crucial…

Modulational instabilities play a key role in a wide range of nonlinear optical phenomena, leading e.g. to the formation of spatial and temporal solitons, rogue waves and chaotic dynamics. Here we experimentally demonstrate the existence of…