Related papers: Tetrahedrality dictates dynamics in hard spheres

Despite the enormous theoretical and application interests, a fundamental understanding of the glassy dynamics remains elusive. The static properties of glassy and ordinary liquids are similar, but their dynamics are dramatically different.…

The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…

A link between structural ordering and slow dynamics has recently attracted much attention from the context of the origin of glassy slow dynamics. Candidates for such structural order are icosahedral, exotic amorphous, and crystal-like.…

Dynamic heterogeneity in glass-formers has been related to their static structure using the concept of dynamic propensity. We re-examine this relationship by analyzing dynamical fluctuations in two atomistic glass-formers and two…

The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…

Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…

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)…

Glasses remain an elusive and poorly understood state of matter. For example, it is not clear how we can design an efficient macroscopic glass former by tuning the properties of its microscopic building blocks. In this paper, we propose a…

Several experiments on molecular and metallic glasses have shown that the ability of vapor deposition to produce ultrastable glasses is correlated with their structural and thermodynamic properties. Here we investigate the vapor deposition…

Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…

We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…

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,…

Geometric frustration describes the inability of a local molecular arrangement, such as icosahedra found in metallic glasses and in model atomic glass-formers, to tile space. Local icosahedral order however is strongly frustrated in…

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…

We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. Samples in the glassy state show aging, in that the motion of the colloidal particles slows as the sample ages from an initial state. We study the…

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…

We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…

We study by light microscopy a soft glass consisting of a compact arrangement of polydisperse elastic spheres. We show that its slow and non-stationary dynamics results from the unavoidable small fluctuations of temperature, which induce…

We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…

When a liquid freezes, a change in the local atomic structure marks the transition to the crystal. When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, however, no noticeable structural change marks the glass transition. Indeed, characteristic features…