Related papers: Point-to-set lengths, local structure, and glassin…
Glass-forming liquids grow dramatically sluggish upon cooling. This slowdown has long been thought to be accompanied by a growing correlation length. Characteristic dynamical and static length scales, however, have been observed to grow at…
The possible role of growing static order in the dynamical slowing down towards the glass transition has recently attracted considerable attention. On the basis of random first-order transition (RFOT) theory, a new method to measure the…
Existence and growth of amorphous order in supercooled liquids approaching glass transition is a subject of intense research. Even after decades of work, there is still no clear consensus on the molecular mechanisms that lead to a rapid…
We investigate the characteristic length scales associated with the glass transition phenomenon. By studying an atomic glass-forming liquid in negatively curved space, for which the local order is well identified and the amount of…
We analyze static point-to-set correlations in glass-forming liquids. The generic idea is to freeze the position of a set of particles in an equilibrium configuration and to perform sampling in the presence of this additional constraint.…
We review 15 years of theoretical and experimental work on the non-linear response of glassy systems. We argue that an anomalous growth of the peak value of non-linear susceptibilities is a signature of growing "amorphous order" in the…
The precise nature of complex structural relaxation as well as an explanation for the precipitous growth of relaxation time in cooling glass-forming liquids are essential to the understanding of vitrification of liquids. The dramatic…
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…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
The dramatic dynamic slowing down associated with the glass transition is considered by many to be related to the existence of a static length scale that grows when temperature decreases. Defining, identifying and measuring such a length is…
Whether or not there is growing static order accompanying the dynamical heterogeneity and increasing relaxation times seen in glassy systems is a matter of dispute. An obstacle to resolving this issue is that the order is expected to be…
The point-to-set correlation function has proved to be a very valuable tool to probe structural correlations in disordered systems, but more than that, its detailed behavior has been used to try to draw information on the mechanisms leading…
We discuss a novel approach, the point-to-set correlation functions, that allows to determine relevant static and dynamic length scales in glass-forming liquids. We find that static length scales increase monotonically when the temperature…
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…
It has been demonstrated recently that supercooled liquids sharing simple structural features (e.g. pair distribution functions) may exhibit strikingly distinct dynamical behavior. Here we show that a more subtle structural feature…
We propose that the concept of liquids characterized by a given locally preferred structure (LPS) could help in understanding the observed phenomenon of polyamorphism. ``True polyamorphism'' would involve the competition between two (or…
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…
Cavity point-to-set correlations are real-space tools to detect the roughening of the free-energy landscape that accompanies the dynamical slowdown of glass-forming liquids. Measuring these correlations in model glass formers remains,…
Exploring structural order in disordered systems including liquids and glasses is an intriguing but challenging issue in condensed matter physics. Here we construct a new parameter based on the angular distribution function of particles and…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…