Related papers: The race to the bottom: approaching the ideal glas…
The glass transition can simply be viewed as the point at which the viscosity of a structurally disordered liquid reaches 10^{13} Poise [1]. This definition is operational but it sidesteps fundamental controversies about the glass: Is the…
The idea that a thermodynamic glass transition of some sort underlies the observed glass formation has been highly debated since Kauzmann first stressed the hypothetical entropy crisis that could take place if one were able to equilibrate…
We provide here a brief perspective on the glass transition field. It is an assessment, written from the point of view of theory, of where the field is and where it seems to be heading. We first give an overview of the main phenomenological…
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…
When we lower the temperature of a liquid, at some point we meet a first order phase transition to the crystal. Yet, under certain conditions it is possible to keep the system in its metastable phase and to avoid crystallization. In this…
Diffusivity, a measure for how rapidly a fluid self-mixes, shows an intimate, but seemingly fragmented, connection to thermodynamics. On one hand, the "configurational" contribution to entropy (related to the number of mechanically-stable…
The interplay of slow dynamics and thermodynamic features of dense liquids is studied by examinining how the glass transition changes depending on the presence or absence of Lennard-Jones-like attractions. Quite different thermodynamic…
Glass-to-glass and liquid-to-liquid phase transitions were observed many years ago in bulk and confined water with or without applied pressure. It is shown that they result from the competition of two-liquid phases separated by an enthalpy…
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…
The nature of the glass transition is theoretically understood in the mean-field limit of infinite spatial dimensions, but the problem remains totally open in physical dimensions. Nontrivial finite-dimensional fluctuations are hard to…
Tackling the low-temperature fate of supercooled liquids is challenging due to the immense timescales involved, which prevent equilibration and lead to the operational glass transition. Relating glassy behaviour to an underlying,…
Based on experimental evidences we present a phenomenological description of the thermal glass transition as a dynamical phase transition. Different susceptibilities calculated on the basis of this description are in good qualitative…
It has been recently shown that one can understand the Prigogine-Defay ratio at the glass transition in terms of freezing into one of the many inherent states of the undercooled liquid. In the present paper, the treatment is extended to the…
We review recent developments in structural-dynamical phase transitions in trajectory space. An open question is how the dynamic facilitation theory of the glass transition may be reconciled with thermodynamic theories that posit a…
Glass is everywhere. We use and are surrounded by glass objects which make tangible the reality of glass as a distinct state of matter. Yet, glass as we know it is usually obtained by cooling a liquid sufficiently rapidly below its melting…
The topic of the glass transition gives rise to a a wide diversity of views. It is, accordingly, characterized by a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical perspective. In this chapter, I provide some elements…
The glass transition refers to the non-equilibrium process by which an equilibrium liquid is transformed to a non-equilibrium disordered solid, or vice versa. Associated response functions, such as heat capacities, are markedly different on…
Melt supercooling leads to glass formation. Liquid-to-liquid phase transitions are observed depending on thermal paths. Viscosity, density and surface tension thermal dependences measured at heating and subsequent cooling show hysteresis…
The physics of the glass transition and amorphous materials continues to attract the attention of a wide research community after decades of effort. Supercooled liquids and glasses have been studied numerically since the advent of molecular…
In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or…