Related papers: Point-to-set lengths, local structure, and glassin…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
The synergetic approach proposed here is based on characteristic instability of chemical bonding in the form of the bond wave considered as the spatiotemporal correlation between the elementary acts of bond exchange. In frames of the model,…
We investigate the growth of dynamic heterogeneity in a glassy hard-sphere mixture for volume fractions up to and including the mode-coupling transition. We use an 80 000 particle system to test a new procedure to evaluate a dynamic…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
Glasses are ubiquitous amorphous solids that remain one of the big mysteries in condensed matter. Despite the vast body of literature on glasses, a unifying approach to link the structure and dynamics of glasses is still missing. A growing…
The topic of the glass transition gives rise to a a wide diversity of views. It is, accordingly, characterized by a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical perspective. In this chapter, I provide some elements…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
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…
Most of the liquid-state theories, including glass-transition theories, are constructed on the basis of two-body density correlations. However, we have recently shown that many-body correlations, in particular bond orientational…
In off-equilibrium dynamics we define a dynamical correlation length which is proportional to the size of the region in which the atoms move in a correlated way. General arguments indicate that this dynamical correlation length diverges at…
There is a certain consensus that the very fast growth of the relaxation time $\tau$ occurring in glass-forming liquids on lowering the temperature must be due to the thermally activated rearrangement of correlated regions of growing size.…
Glass-forming liquids exhibit slow dynamics below their melting temperatures, maintaining an amorphous structure reminiscent of normal liquids. Distinguishing microscopic structures in the supercooled and high-temperature regimes remains a…
We summarize studies of growing lengths in different aging systems. The article is structured as follows. We recall the definition of a number of observables, typically correlations and susceptibilities, that give access to dynamic and…
If a liquid is cooled rapidly to form a glass, its structural relaxation becomes retarded, producing a drastic increase in viscosity. In two dimensions, strong long-wavelength fluctuations persist, even at low temperature, making it…
We formulate a hydrodynamic theory of $p-$atic liquid crystals, namely two-dimensional anisotropic fluids endowed with generic $p-$fold rotational symmetry. Our approach, based on an order parameter tensor that directly embodies the…
We introduce a new quantity to probe the glass transition. This quantity is a linear generalized compressibility which depends solely on the positions of the particles. We have performed a molecular dynamics simulation on a glass forming…
The formation of bulk metallic glass requires the constituent elements to have a negative heat of mixing but has no restrictions on its magnitude. An understanding of this issue is lacking due to the absence of a valid method for describing…
Liquids generally become more ordered upon cooling. However, it has been a long-standing debate on whether such structural ordering in liquid water takes place continuously or discontinuosly: continuum vs. mixture models. Here, by computer…
Identifying the regions responsible for plastic flow in amorphous solids remains an open problem, since structural disorder seems to prevent the direct application of concepts such as dislocations, topological defects that successfully…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…