Related papers: Tetrahedrality dictates dynamics in hard spheres
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
Few questions in condensed matter science have proven as difficult to unravel as the interplay between structure and dynamics in supercooled liquids and glasses. The conundrum: close to the glass transition, the dynamics slow down…
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 report Molecular Dynamics simulations for a new model of tetrahedral network glass-former, based on short-range, spherical potentials. Despite the simplicity of the forcefield employed, our model reproduces some essential physical…
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…
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…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
We study theoretically and numerically a family of multi-point dynamic susceptibilities that quantify the strength and characteristic lengthscales of dynamic heterogeneities in glass-forming materials. We use general theoretical arguments…
I briefly review a recent series of papers putting forward a coarse-grained theoretical approach to the physics of supercooled liquids approaching their glass transition. After a suitable coarse-graining, the dynamics of the liquid is…
Faced with the Kauzmann paradox, glasses have always been a puzzle for condensed matter theorists. We show that in a new picture of condensed matter, which takes into account the coherent interaction mechanisms of QED, glasses are nothing…
Many structural glasses feature static and dynamic mechanical properties that can depend strongly on glass formation history. The degree of universality of this history-dependence, and what it is possibly affected by, are largely…
We use the isoconfigurational (IC) ensemble to show the connection between emerging heterogeneities in the tetrahedral order parameter and the dynamic propensity in a mildly undercooled glass-forming liquid. We observe that spatially…
Motivated by a recently identified severe discrepancy between a static and a dynamic theory of glasses, we numerically investigate the behavior of dense hard spheres in spatial dimensions 3 to 12. Our results are consistent with the static…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
We conduct a numerical study of the dynamical behavior of a system of three-dimensional crosses, particles that consist of three mutually perpendicular line segments rigidly joined at their midpoints. In an earlier study [W. van Ketel et…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
As approaching the glass transition, particle motion in liquids becomes highly heterogeneous and regions with virtually no mobility coexist with liquid-like domains. This complex dynamics is believed to be responsible for different…
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…
Dense assemblies of self-propelled particles undergo a nonequilibrium form of glassy dynamics. Physical intuition suggests that increasing departure from equilibrium due to active forces fluidifies a glassy system. We falsify this belief by…