Related papers: Local thermal energy as a structural indicator in …
It is difficult to relate the properties of liquids and glasses directly to their structure because of complexity in the structure which defies precise definition. The potential energy landscape (PEL) approach is a very insightful way to…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
When a liquid freezes, a change in the local atomic structure marks the transition to the crystal. When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, however, no noticeable structural change marks the glass transition. Indeed, characteristic features…
Energy landscapes are high-dimensional surfaces representing the dependence of system energy on variable configurations, which determine crucially the system's emergent behavior but are difficult to be analyzed due to their high-dimensional…
At temperatures well below their glass transition, the deformation properties of bulk metallic glasses are characterised by a sharp transition from elasticity to plasticity, a reproducible yield stress, and an approximately linear decrease…
Key aspects of glasses are controlled by the presence of excitations in which a group of particles can rearrange. Surprisingly, recent observations indicate that their density is dramatically reduced and their size decreases as the…
We numerically study the interplay between heterogeneous dynamics and properties of negatively curved regions of the potential energy surface in a model glassy system. We find that the unstable modes of saddles and quasi-saddles undergo a…
From numerical minimization of a model free energy functional for a system of hard spheres, we show that the width of the local peaks of the time-averaged density field at a glassy free-energy minimum exhibits large spatial variation,…
We compare dynamical heterogeneities in equilibrated supercooled liquids and in the nonequilibrium glassy state within the framework of the random first order transition theory. Fluctuating mobility generation and transport in the glass are…
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
Volume and enthalpy relaxation of glasses after a sudden temperature change has been extensively studied since Kovacs seminal work. One observes an asymmetric approach to equilibrium upon cooling versus heating and, more…
We derive a microscopic theory of glassy dynamics based on the transport of voids by micro-string motions, each of which involves particles arranged in a line hopping simultaneously displacing one another. Disorder is modeled by a random…
In this work, we present a new model for the interpretation of the local dynamic behavior and the mechanical reinforcement mechanism in polymer nanocomposites. The temperature dependence of the dynamics in the glassy region is described by…
The scaling properties of the soft-sphere potential allow the derivation of an exact expression for the pressure of a frozen liquid, i.e., the pressure corresponding to configurations which are local minima in its multidimensional potential…
We combine computer simulations and analytical theory to investigate the glassy dynamics in dense assemblies of athermal particles evolving under the sole influence of self-propulsion. The simulations reveal that when the persistence time…
The interrelations between short range structural and elastic aspects in glasses and glass forming liquids pose important and yet unresolved questions. In this paper these relations are analyzed for mono-atomic glasses and stressed liquids…
An analysis of the dynamics is performed, of exactly solvable models for fragile and strong glasses, exploiting the partitioning of the free energy landscape in inherent structures. The results are compared with the exact solution of the…
For several atomistic models of glass formers, at conditions below their glassy dynamics onset temperatures, ${T_\mathrm{o}}$, we use importance sampling of trajectory space to study the structure, statistics and dynamics of excitations…
It is possible to formulate the thermodynamics of a glass forming system in terms of the properties of inherent structures, which correspond to the minima of the potential energy and build up the potential energy landscape in the…
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…