Related papers: Deconstructing the glass transition through critic…
Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses remains elusive since the glass transition itself is not fully understood, even in well studied examples of glass formers in two dimensions. In this context we demonstrate here: (i) a…
Ultrastable glasses, amorphous solids with exceptionally low-energy states and enhanced kinetic, thermodynamic and mechanical stability, have long been a subject of intense experimental interest. Over the past decade, their computational…
Within the framework of the mode-coupling theory of super-cooled liquids, we investigate new phenomena in colloidal systems on approach to their glass transitions. When the inter-particle potential contains an attractive part, besides the…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…
This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…
Over the last decade computer simulations have had an increasing role in shedding light on difficult statistical physical phenomena and in particular on the ubiquitous problem of the glass transition. Here in a wide variety of materials the…
We observed a two-step glass transition in monolayers of colloidal ellipsoids by video microscopy. The glass transition in the rotational degree of freedom was at a lower density than that in the translational degree of freedom. Between the…
In 1995, the Nobel Price winner P.W. Anderson made the following remarkable statement: The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and glass transition. Although…
A new theory for dynamics of concentrated colloidal suspensions and the colloidal glass transition is proposed. The starting point is the memory function representation of the density correlation function. The memory function can be…
We show that the slowing of the dynamics in simulations of several model glass-forming liquids is equivalent to the hard-sphere glass transition in the low-pressure limit. In this limit, we find universal behavior of the relaxation time by…
Faced with the Kauzmann paradox, glasses have always been a puzzle for condensed matter theorists. We show that in a new picture of condensed matter, which takes into account the coherent interaction mechanisms of QED, glasses are nothing…
The idea that a thermodynamic glass transition of some sort underlies the observed glass formation has been highly debated since Kauzmann first stressed the hypothetical entropy crisis that could take place if one were able to equilibrate…
Metallic glasses possess outstanding mechanical and physical properties, making them promising candidates for advanced structural and functional applications; however, the lack of understanding and control over their glass transition and…
We give a brief introduction to the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition, a theory which was proposed a while ago to describe the dynamics of supercooled liquids. After presenting the basic equations of the theory, we review some of…
We provide a detailed derivation of the mode-coupling equations for a colloidal liquid confined by two parallel smooth walls. We introduce irreducible memory kernels for the different relaxation channels thereby extending the projection…
A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…
When we lower the temperature of a liquid, at some point we meet a first order phase transition to the crystal. Yet, under certain conditions it is possible to keep the system in its metastable phase and to avoid crystallization. In this…
We review recent results from computer simulation studies of polymer glasses, from chain dynamics around the glass transition temperature Tg to the mechanical behaviour below Tg. These results clearly show that modern computer simulations…
We study concentrated binary colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition as the volume fraction $\phi$ of particles is increased. We use confocal microscopy to directly observe particle motion within dense samples…