Related papers: A Topologically Driven Glass in Ring Polymers
When classical systems fail to explore their entire configurational space, intriguing macroscopic phenomena like aging and glass formation may emerge. Also closed quanto-mechanical systems may stop wandering freely around the whole Hilbert…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
We present Molecular Dynamics simulations of the thermal glass transition in a dense model polymer liquid. We performed a comparative study of both constant volume and constant pressure cooling of the polymer melt. Great emphasis was laid…
The topological nature of the disorder of glasses and supercooled liquids strongly affects their high-frequency dynamics. In order to understand its main features, we analytically studied a simple topologically disordered model, where the…
The equilibrium statistical mechanics of classical directed polymers in 2 dimensions is well known to be equivalent to the imaginary-time quantum dynamics of a 1+1-dimensional many-particle system, with polymer configurations corresponding…
The glass transition temperature and its connection to statistical properties of confined and free-standing polymer films of varying thickness containing unentangled to highly entangled bead-spring chains are studied by molecular dynamics…
We consider a gauge theory of the glass transition in the frustrated XY model being simplest model containing topologically nontrivial excitations. We describe the transition kinetics and find that the three-dimensional system exhibits the…
The glass transition in binary mixtures of star polymers is studied by mode coupling theory and extensive molecular dynamics computer simulations. In particular, we have explored vitrification in the parameter space of size asymmetry…
The dynamics of many glassy systems are known to exhibit string-like hopping motions each consisting of a line of particles displacing one and other. By using molecular dynamics simulations of glassy polymers, we show that these motions…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of an idealized polymer melt surrounding a nanoscopic filler particle to probe the effects of a filler on the local melt structure and dynamics. We show that the glass transition temperature $T_g$…
The review of the modern results in the theoretical and experimental study of the localized interacting electrons is given. After theoretical prediction of the Coulomb gap and the new temperature law in the variable range hopping conduction…
In this chapter, a study of the glass transitions in colloidal systems is presented, in connection with gelation, mainly from theoretical and simulation results. Mode Coupling Theory, which anticipated the existence of attraction driven…
As shown by early studies on mean-field models of the glass transition, the geometrical features of the energy landscape provide fundamental information on the dynamical transition at the Mode-Coupling temperature $T_d$. We show that active…
Some recent results on the rotational dynamics of polymers are reviewed and extended. We focus here on the relaxation of a polymer, either flexible or semiflexible, initially wrapped around a rigid rod. We also study the steady polymer…
The origin of the dramatic slowdown of dynamics near the glass transition temperature (Tg) remains a long-standing fundamental and unresolved issue in soft condensed matter. While single-molecule (SM) experiments using fluorescent probes…
The interplay between the topological and geometrical properties of a polymer ring can be clarified by establishing the entanglement trapped in any portion (arc) of the ring. The task requires to close the open arcs into a ring, and the…
We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are…
We investigate, using numerical simulations, the conformations of isolated active ring polymers. We find that the their behaviour depends crucially on their size: short rings ($N \lesssim$ 100) are swelled whereas longer rings ($N \gtrsim$…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…