Related papers: Nature of excitations and defects in structural gl…
Recent studies point out far-reaching connections between the topological characteristics of structural glasses and their material properties, paralleling results in quantum physics that highlight the relevance of the nature of the…
The low-temperature thermal properties of dielectric crystals are governed by acoustic excitations with large wavelengths that are well described by plane waves. This is the Debye model, which rests on the assumption that the medium is an…
Low-temperature properties of crystalline solids can be understood using harmonic perturbations around a perfect lattice, as in Debye's theory. Low-temperature properties of amorphous solids, however, strongly depart from such descriptions,…
Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbors and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape containing multiple minima (basins) separated by high barriers.…
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,…
The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…
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…
Glasses and gels, widely encountered amorphous solids with diverse industrial and everyday applications, share intriguing similarities such as rigidity without crystalline order and dynamic slowing down during aging. However, the underlying…
In this work, we study the nature of transitions between inherent structures of a two-dimensional model supercooled liquid. We demonstrate that these transitions occur predominately along a small number of directions on the energy…
Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for a system of $10^6$ particles, the response of a dense amorphous solid to the continuous expansion of its volume is investigated. We find that the spatially uniform glassy state becomes…
The quantum excitations in glasses have long presented a set of puzzles for condensed matter physicists. A common view is that they are largely disordered analogs of elementary excitations in crystals, supplemented by two level systems…
We investigate the characteristic length scales associated with the glass transition phenomenon. By studying an atomic glass-forming liquid in negatively curved space, for which the local order is well identified and the amount of…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
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…
Topological defects are singularities within a field that cannot be removed by continuous transformations. The definition of these irregularities requires an ordered reference configuration, calling into question whether they exist in…
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,…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
We use theory and simulations to investigate the existence of amorphous glassy states in ultrasoft colloids. We combine the hyper-netted chain approximation with mode-coupling theory to study the dynamic phase diagram of soft repulsive…
Experimentally resolving atomic-scale structural changes of a deformed glass remains challenging owing to the disordered nature of glass structure. Here, we show that the structural anisotropy emerges as a general hallmark for different…
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…