Related papers: Nonlinear modes disentangle glassy and Goldstone m…
The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all…
Glasses have a large excess of low-frequency vibrational modes in comparison with crystalline solids. We show that such a feature is a necessary consequence of the geometry generic to weakly connected solids. In particular, we analyze the…
Soft, quasilocalized excitations (QLEs) are known to generically emerge in a broad class of disordered solids, and to govern many facets of the physics of glasses, from wave attenuation to plastic instabilities. In view of this key role of…
We study theoretically the non-linear response properties of glass formers. We establish several general results which, together with the assumption of Time-Temperature Superposition, lead to a relation between the non-linear response and…
We study the equilibrium statistical properties of the potential energy landscape of several glass models in a temperature regime so far inaccessible to computer simulations. We show that unstable modes of the stationary points undergo a…
In this paper we review a recent proposal to understand the long time limit of glassy dynamics in terms of an appropriate Markov Chain. [1]. The advantages of the resulting construction are many. The first one is that it gives a quasi…
The anharmonic soft modes studied in recent numerical work in the glass phase of simple liquids have an unstable core, stabilized by the positive restoring forces of the surrounding elastic medium. The present paper formulates an unstable…
We combine the hyper-netted chain approximation of liquid state theory with the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition to analyze the structure and dynamics of soft spheres interacting via harmonic repulsion. We determine the locus of…
Soft quasilocalized modes (QLMs) are universally featured by structural glasses quenched from a melt, and are supposedly involved in a number of glassy anomalies such as the low temperature scaling of their thermal conductivity and specific…
We study the nonlinear dynamics of a multi-mode random laser using the methods of statistical physics of disordered systems. A replica-symmetry breaking phase transition is predicted as a function of the pump intensity. We thus show that…
We numerically study the evolution of the vibrational density of states $D(\omega)$ of zero-temperature glasses when their kinetic stability is varied over an extremely broad range, ranging from poorly annealed glasses obtained by…
Understanding the statistical mechanics of low-energy excitations in structural glasses has been the focus of extensive research efforts in the past decades due to their key roles in determining the low-temperature mechanical and transport…
Glasses, unlike their crystalline counterparts, exhibit low-frequency nonphononic excitations whose frequencies $\omega$ follow a universal $\mathcal{D}\!\left(\omega\right)\!\sim\!\omega^4$ density of states. The process of glass formation…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
We review an scenario for the non-equilibrium dynamics of glassy systems that has been motivated by the exact solution of simple models. This approach allows one to set on firmer grounds well-known phenomenological theories. The old ideas…
In this paper we consider an exactly solvable model which displays glassy behavior at zero temperature due to entropic barriers. The new ingredient of the model is the existence of different energy scales or modes associated to different…
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…
Quasi two-dimensional pattern forming systems with spontaneously broken isotropy represent a novel symmetry class, that is experimentally accessible in electroconvection of homeotropically aligned liquid crystals. We present a weakly…
We introduce an exactly solvable model for glassy dynamics with many relaxational modes, each one characterized by a different relaxational time-scale. Analytical solution of the aging dynamics at low temperatures shows that a…
In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet,…