Related papers: Large-scale structure and hyperuniformity of amorp…
Disordered hyperuniform many-body systems are distinguishable states of matter that lie between a crystal and liquid: they are like perfect crystals in the way they suppress large-scale density fluctuations and yet are like liquids or…
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…
Space-filling assemblies of athermal hydrophobic particles floating at an air-water interface, called particle rafts, are shown to undergo an unusual phase transition between two i.e., a low density `less-rigid and a high density…
The selection of stacking order in a broad range of close-packed polymorphic materials remains a challenging enigma. Using in situ cryogenic transmission electron microscopy, we uncover the atomistic mechanisms governing the vapour…
We explore the nature of glass-formation in variable spatial dimensionality ($d$) based on the generalized entropy theory, a synthesis of the Adam-Gibbs model with direct computation of the configurational entropy of polymer fluids using an…
We connect the configurational entropy of a liquid to the geometrical properties of its local energy landscape, using a high-temperature expansion. It is proposed that correlations between local structures arises from their overlap and,…
The fundamental properties of ice have always attracted a lot of interest due to omnipresence of ice in many different natural contexts. Since cubic ice recently become experimentally accessible from a low-density gas hydrate precursor [1,…
In this work, we provide mechanistic insight into the initial stages of formation of ice across the limit of stability of supercooled water. Such an analysis is particularly important since crystal nucleation is not a relevant mechanism…
Although several theories relate the steep slowdown of glass formers to increasing spatial correlations of some sort, standard static correlation functions show no evidence for this. We present results that reveal for the first time a…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…
Dimensionality strongly affects thermal fluctuations and critical dynamics of equilibrium systems. These influences persist in amorphous systems going through the nonequilibrium glass transition. Here, we experimentally study the glass…
Supercooled liquids exhibit spatial heterogeneity in the dynamics of their fluctuating atomic arrangements. The length and time scales of the heterogeneous dynamics are central to the glass transition and influence nucleation and growth of…
Understanding the atomic-scale structure and dynamics of amorphous oxide surfaces is essential for interpreting their chemical reactivity, mechanical stability, and interfacial behavior, yet direct experimental characterization remains…
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 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,…
Framing the glass formation within standard statistical mechanics is an outstanding problem of condensed matter theory. To provide new insight, we investigate the structural properties of the Lennard-Jones fluid in the very-low temperature…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
As one of the most fascinating confined water/ice phenomena, two-dimensional square ice has been extensively studied and experimentally confirmed in recent years. Apart from the unidirectional homogeneous square icing patterns considered in…