Related papers: Experimental Evidence for a Structural-Dynamical T…
The crystallization of hard spheres at equilibrium is perhaps the most familiar example of an entropically-driven phase transition. In recent years, it has become clear that activity can dramatically alter this order-disorder transition in…
We investigate the response of a system of hard spheres to two classes of perturbations over a range of densities spanning the fluid, crystalline, and glassy regimes within a molecular dynamics framework. Firstly, we consider the relaxation…
We introduce a new and robust approach for characterizing spatially and temporally heterogeneous behavior within a system based on the evolution of dynamic fuctuations once averaged over different space lengths and time scales. We apply it…
The emergence of particle irreversibility in periodically driven colloidal suspensions has been interpreted as resulting either from a nonequilibrium phase transition to an absorbing state or from the chaotic nature of particle…
Kinetically constrained models (KCMs) have been used to study and understand the origin of glassy dynamics. Despite having trivial thermodynamic properties, their dynamics slows down dramatically at low temperatures while displaying…
Understanding glasses and the glass transition requires comprehending the nature of the crossover from the ergodic (or equilibrium) regime, in which the stationary properties of the system have no history dependence, to the mysterious glass…
We will review some of the theoretical progresses that have been recently done in the study of slow dynamics of glassy systems: the general techniques used for studying the dynamics in the mean field approximation and the emergence of a…
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…
We analyse numerically thermal fluctuations of the static overlap between equilibrium configurations in a glass-forming liquid approaching the glass transition. We find that the emergence of slow dynamics near the onset temperature…
In a recent article [M. Merolle et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102, 10837 (2005)] it was argued that dynamic heterogeneity in $d$-dimensional glass formers is a manifestation of an order-disorder phenomenon in the $d+1$ dimensions of…
We show how dynamical heterogeneities in glass forming systems emerge as a consequence of the existence of dynamical constraints, and we offer an interpretation of the glass transition as an entropy crisis in trajectory space (space-time)…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
Recent theoretical advances have led to the creation of a unified phase diagram for the thermal glass and athermal jamming transitions. This diagram makes clear that, while related, the mode-coupling---or dynamic---glass transition is…
The sluggish and heterogeneous dynamics of glass forming liquids is frequently associated to the transient coexistence of two phases of particles, respectively with an high and low mobility. In the absence of a dynamical order parameter…
We use computer simulations to study the glass transition of dense fluids made of polydisperse, repulsive spheres. For hard particles, we vary the volume fraction, phi, and use compressible particles to explore finite temperatures, T>0. In…
We show that the dynamics of kinetically constrained models of glass formers takes place at a first-order coexistence line between active and inactive dynamical phases. We prove this by computing the large-deviation functions of suitable…
Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics exhibit a variety of complex phenomena far from equilibrium. It inherits challenges of equilibrium, including accurately describing the joint distribution of a large number of configurations, and also…
In the free energy landscape picture of glassy systems, the slow dynamics characteristic of these systems is believed to be due to the existence of a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show here that for a…
Dynamics is central to living systems. In the last two decades, experiments have revealed that the dynamics in diverse biological systems - from intracellular cytoplasm to cellular and organismal aggregates - are remarkably similar to that…