Related papers: Nature of excitations and defects in structural gl…
We review the mechanism for transport in strongly anharmonic chains of oscillators near the atomic limit where all oscillators are decoupled. In this regime, the motion of most oscillators remains close to integrable, i.e. quasi-periodic,…
Understanding the mechanical response and failure of solids is of obvious importance in their use as structural materials. The nature of plastic deformation leading to yielding of amorphous solids has been vigorously pursued in recent…
Amorphous solids are mechanically rigid while possessing a disordered structure similar to that of dense liquids. Recent research indicates that dynamical heterogeneity, spatio-temporal fluctuations in local dynamical behavior, might help…
One outstanding problem in the physics of glassy solids is understanding the statistics and properties of the low-energy excitations that stem from the disorder that characterizes these systems' microstructure. In this work we introduce a…
We investigate the vibrational properties of topologically disordered materials by analytically studying particles that harmonically oscillate around random positions. Exploiting classical field theory in the thermodynamic limit at $T=0$,…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
The relaxation dynamics of glass-forming systems shows a multitude of features that are absent in normal liquids, such as non-exponential relaxation and a strong temperature-dependence of the relaxation time. Connecting these dynamic…
Measuring, characterizing and modelling the slow dynamics of glassy soft matter is a great challenge, with an impact that ranges from industrial applications to fundamental issues in modern statistical physics, such as the glass transition…
Thermal conductivity of a model glass-forming system in the liquid and glass states is studied using extensive numerical simulations. We show that near the glass transition temperture, where the structural relaxation time becomes very long,…
The viscous slowing down of supercooled liquids that leads to glass formation can be considered as a classical, and is assuredly a thoroughly studied, example of a "jamming process". In this review, we stress the distinctive features…
We present the study of the landscape structure of athermal soft spheres both as a function of the packing fraction and of the energy. We find that, on approaching the jamming transition, the number of different configurations available to…
A comparative study of the dynamics of inherent structures at low temperatures is performed on different models of glass formers: a three dimensional Lennard-Jones binary mixture (LJBM), facilitated spin models (either symmetrically…
We develop a framework for understanding the difference between strong and fragile behavior in the dynamics of glass-forming liquids from the properties of the potential energy landscape. Our approach is based on a master equation…
Point defects in real crystals at finite temperatures are inevitable. Their dynamics severely influence the mechanical properties of crystals under shear giving rise to nonlinear effects such as ductility. Therefore, it is crucial to…
Both structural glasses and disordered crystals are known to exhibit anomalous thermal, vibrational, and acoustic properties at low temperatures or low energies, what is still a matter of lively debate. To shed light on this issue, we…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
The very nature of glass is somewhat mysterious: while relaxation times in glasses are of sufficient magnitude that large-scale motion on the atomic level is essentially as slow as it is in the crystalline state, the structure of glass…
The mechanical response of solids depends on temperature because the way atoms and molecules respond collectively to deformation is affected at various levels by thermal motion. This is a fundamental problem of solid state science and plays…
If a liquid is cooled rapidly to form a glass, its structural relaxation becomes retarded, producing a drastic increase in viscosity. In two dimensions, strong long-wavelength fluctuations persist, even at low temperature, making it…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of glass-forming materials and jamming matter by means of a geometrically driven approach based on a revised cell theory. By considering the system as constituted of jammed blocks of increasing…