Related papers: Cluster structure and dynamics in gels and glasses
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a simple model for a colloidal gel at a low volume fraction. We find that due to the presence of the open spanning network this dynamics shows at low…
The interrelation of dynamic processes active on separated time-scales in glasses and viscous liquids is investigated using a model displaying two time-scale bifurcations both between fast and secondary relaxation and between secondary and…
The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, {\it via} a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations…
The glass transition GT is usually thought of as a structural arrest that occurs during the cooling of a liquid, or sometimes a plastic crystal, trapping a metastable state of the system before it can recrystallize to stabler forms1. This…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we have determined that the nature of dynamical heterogeneity in jammed liquids is very sensitive to short-ranged attractions. Weakly attractive systems differ little from dense hard-sphere and…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
We report the combined results of molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical calculations concerning various dynamical arrest transitions in a model system representing a dipolar fluid, namely, N (softcore) rigid spheres interacting…
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…
When an ice crystal is born from liquid water two key changes occur: (i) the molecules order; and (ii) the mobility of the molecules drops as they adopt their lattice positions. Most research on ice nucleation (and crystallization in…
The dynamical behavior of a kind of models with hierarchically constrained dynamics is investigated. The models exhibit many properties resembling real structural glasses. In particular, we focus on the study of time-dependent temperature…
In the wake of previous studies on the rattling-and-jumping diffusion in smectic liquid crystal phases of colloidal rods, we analyze here for the first time the heterogeneous dynamics in columnar phases. More specifically, we perform…
This article concerns the correspondence between thermodynamics and the morphology of simple fluids in terms of clusters. Definitions of clusters providing a geometric interpretation of the liquid-gas phase transition are reviewed with an…
The elusive connection between dynamics and local structure in supercooled liquids is an important piece of the puzzle in the unsolved problem of the glass transition. The Johari-Goldstein beta relaxation, ubiquitous in glass-forming…
Using simulations of hard rods in smectic-A states, we find non-gaussian diffusion and heterogeneous dynamics due to the equilibrium periodic smectic density profiles, which give rise to permanent barriers for layer-to-layer diffusion. This…
The following properties are in the present literature associated with the behavior of super-cooled glass-forming liquids: faster than exponential growth of the relaxation time, dynamical heterogeneities, growing point-to-set correlation…
We demonstrate that an extended picture of kinetic constraints in glass-forming liquids is sufficient to explain dynamic anomalies observed in dense suspensions of strongly attracting colloidal particles. We augment a simple model of…
The dynamical heterogeneities (DH) in non-ergodic states of an attractive colloidal glass are studied, as a function of the waiting time. Whereas the fluid states close to vitrify showed strong DH, the distribution of squared displacements…
The transition from a flowing to a static state in a granular material is studied using large-scale, 3D particle simulations. Similar to glasses, this transition is manifested in the development of a plateau in the contact normal force…
We present computer simulations of concentrated solutions of unknotted nonconcatenated semiflexible ring polymers. Unlike in their flexible counterparts, shrinking involves a strong energetic penalty, favoring interpenetration and…
We review recent developments in structural-dynamical phase transitions in trajectory space. An open question is how the dynamic facilitation theory of the glass transition may be reconciled with thermodynamic theories that posit a…