Related papers: Facets of glass physics
Glass is an under-cooled liquid that very slowly relaxes towards the equilibrium crystalline state. Its energy balance is ill understood, since it is widely believed that the glassy state cannot be described thermodynamically. However, the…
Can the laws of physics be unified. One of the most puzzling challenges is to reconcile physics and chemistry, where molecular physics meets condensed-matter physics, resulting from the scaling effect and dynamic fluctuation of glassy…
Time crystals are an enigmatic phase of matter in which a quantum mechanical system displays repetitive, observable motion - they spontaneously break the time translation symmetry. On the other hand optomechanical systems, where mechanical…
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to…
Crystalline calcium-aluminates include the phases essential in the setting of Portland cements developed over the last century. It is only within recent decades, however, that calcium-aluminate melts and glasses have begun to attract…
Understanding, predicting and eventually improving the resistance to fracture of silicate materials is of primary importance to design new glasses that would be tougher, while retaining their transparency. However, the atomic mechanism of…
In the 20th century, quantum mechanics connected the particle and wave concepts of light and thereby made mechanisms accessible that had never been imagined before. Processes such as stimulated emission and quantum entanglement have…
The physics of the glass transition and amorphous materials continues to attract the attention of a wide research community after decades of effort. Supercooled liquids and glasses have been studied numerically since the advent of molecular…
Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high. In these samples, the particles are roughly analogous to individual molecules in a traditional glass. This…
Numerical simulations on Ising Spin Glasses show that spin glass transitions do not obey the usual universality rules which hold at canonical second order transitions. On the other hand the dynamics at the approach to the transition appear…
Key to resolving the scientific challenge of the glass transition is to understand the origin of the massive increase in viscosity of liquids cooled below their melting temperature (avoiding crystallisation). A number of competing and often…
Granulate physics has made considerable progress during the past decades in the understanding of static and dynamic properties of large ensembles of interacting macroscopic particles, including the modeling of phenomena like jamming,…
The formulation of the mean-field, infinite-dimensional solution of hard sphere glasses is a significant milestone for theoretical physics. How relevant this description might be for understanding low-dimensional glass-forming liquids,…
The similarity in atomic structure between liquids and glasses has stimulated a long-standing hypothesis that the nature of glasses may be more fluid like, rather than an apparent solid. In principle, the nature of glasses can be…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
We discuss a theoretical approach to structural glasses as they happen in real situations. Older ideas based on `configurational entropy', on `fictive temperatures' and on Edwards' `compactivity' are sharpened and unified in an out of…
Concept of curvature of liquid surrounding a spherical surface seems obvious in daily life, but based on earthly conditions everywhere. However, our understanding about the concept seems more transparent when we keep the system out of the…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…
Since ancient times, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in its description of physical phenomena. As humankind enters a period of advancement where the completion of the much coveted theory of quantum gravity is at hand, there is…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…