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We study by Molecular Dynamics simulation a dense one-component system of particles confined on a spherical substrate. We more specifically investigate the evolution of the structural and dynamical properties of the system when changing the…
We review 15 years of theoretical and experimental work on the non-linear response of glassy systems. We argue that an anomalous growth of the peak value of non-linear susceptibilities is a signature of growing "amorphous order" in the…
We analyze static point-to-set correlations in glass-forming liquids. The generic idea is to freeze the position of a set of particles in an equilibrium configuration and to perform sampling in the presence of this additional constraint.…
This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…
Broken-symmetry-induced order parameters account for many phenomena in condensed matter physics. For spin glasses, such a framework dictates its theoretical construction, whereas experiments have only established dynamical behaviors such as…
We use dynamic light scattering and computer simulations to study equilibrium dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in concentrated suspensions of colloidal hard spheres. Our study covers an unprecedented density range and spans seven decades…
The shapes of cooperatively rearranging regions in glassy liquids change from being compact at low temperatures to fractal or ``stringy'' as the dynamical crossover temperature from activated to collisional transport is approached from…
We study smectic liquid crystals in random environments, e.g., aerogel. A low temperature analysis reveals that even arbitrarily weak quenched disorder (i.e., arbitrarily low aerogel density) destroys translational (smectic) order. A…
In this review we consider glass states of several disordered systems: vortices in impure superconductors, amorphous magnets, and nematic liquid crystals in random porous media. All these systems can be described by the random-field or…
We review a theoretical perspective of the dynamics of glass forming liquids and the glass transition. It is a perspective we have developed with our collaborators during this decade. It is based upon the structure of trajectory space. This…
We study the phenomenon of self-assembly of silica micro-spheres on a glass plate during evaporation of the solvent from a colloidal suspension. Our experiments unveil an interesting competition between ordering and compaction in a strongly…
We report the structure of transient fluctuations in the liquid phase of a two-dimensional system that exhibits several ordered phases with different symmetries. The density-temperature phase diagram of the system studied, composed of…
In this combined experimental and simulation study, we utilize bond-order topology to quantitatively match particle volume fraction in mechanically uniformly compressed colloidal suspensions with temperature in atomistic simulations. The…
We obtain analytic expressions for the time correlation functions of a liquid of spherical particles, exact in the limit of high dimensions $d$. The derivation is long but straightforward: a dynamic virial expansion for which only the first…
We find in a model system of thermotropic liquid crystals that the translational diffusion coefficient parallel to the director $D_{\parallel}$ first increases and then decreases as temperature drops through the nematic phase, and this…
We use colloidal suspensions encapsulated in emulsion droplets to model confined glass-forming liquids with tunable boundary mobility. We show dynamics in these idealized systems are governed by physical interactions with the boundary.…
We study experimentally the origin of heterogeneous dynamics in strongly driven glass-forming systems. Thereto, we apply a well-defined force with a laser line trap on individual colloidal polystyrene probe particles seeded in an emulsion…
Dynamic facilitation theory assumes short-ranged dynamic constraints to be the essential feature of supercooled liquids and draws much of its conclusions from the study of kinetically constrained models. While deceptively simple, these…
After Boltzmann and Gibbs, the notion of disorder in statistical physics relates to ensembles, not to individual states. This disorder is measured by the logarithm of ensemble volume, the entropy. But recent results about measure…
Motivated by experiments on sheared suspensions that show a transition between ordered and disordered phases, we here study the long-time behavior of a sheared and overdamped 2-d system of particles interacting by repulsive forces. As a…