Related papers: Deconstructing the glass transition through critic…
The quantum critical behavior of the Ising glass in a magnetic field is investigated. We focus on the spin glass to paramagnet transition of the transverse degrees of freedom in the presence of finite longitudinal field. We use two…
Unraveling the connections between microscopic structure, emergent physical properties, and slow dynamics has long been a challenge when studying the glass transition. The absence of clear visible structural order in amorphous…
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…
The growth of correlation lengths in equilibrium glass-forming liquids near the glass transition is considered a critical finding in the quest to understand the physics of glass formation. These understandings helped us understand various…
Recent progress in approaches to determine the elastic constants of solids starting from the microscopic particle interactions is reviewed. On the theoretical side, density functional theory approaches are discussed and compared to more…
Measuring, characterizing and modelling the slow dynamics of glassy soft matter is a great challenge, with an impact that ranges from industrial applications to fundamental issues in modern statistical physics, such as the glass transition…
Predicting crystal nucleation is among the most significant long--standing challenges in condensed matter. In the system most studied (hard sphere colloids), the comparison between experiments performed using static light scattering and…
Colloidal gels have unique mechanical and transport properties that stem from their bicontinous nature, in which a colloidal network is intertwined with a viscous solvent, and have found numerous applications in foods, cosmetics,…
Thermodynamic multi-component solution solidification approach to liquid-to-glass transition is proposed and actual mechanisms underlying vitrification, other than viscous slowdown, are identified. Due to polydisperse aggregation in liquid…
Topological defects are thought to be left behind by the cosmological phase transitions which occur as the universe expands and cools. Similar processes can be studied in the phase transitions which take place in the laboratory:…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
Using the mapping of the Fokker-Planck description of classical stochastic dynamics onto a quantum Hamiltonian, we argue that a dynamical glass transition in the former must have a precise definition in terms of a quantum phase transition…
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 remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of contemporary condensed matter physics. When crystallization is bypassed by rapid cooling, a supercooled liquid, retaining amorphous particle arrangment, results. The…
The nature of the glass transition is theoretically understood in the mean-field limit of infinite spatial dimensions, but the problem remains totally open in physical dimensions. Nontrivial finite-dimensional fluctuations are hard to…
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and…
A theory for the non-local stress in liquids captures the crossover from viscous to elastic correlations upon supercooling. It explains the emergence of long-ranged stress fields in glass which originate from the coupling of shear stress to…
Despite the absence of consensus on a theory of the transition from supercooled liquids to glasses, the experimental observations suggest that a detail-independent theory should exist.
Diverse material classes exhibit practically identical behavior when made viscous upon cooling toward the glass transition, suggesting a common theoretical basis. The first-principles scaling laws that have been proposed to describe the…
Despite decades of research, it remains to be established whether the transformation of a liquid into a glass is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While observations of growing length scales are consistent with thermodynamic…