Related papers: Structural Origin of the Two-Step Glass Transition
Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses remains elusive since the glass transition itself is not fully understood, even in well studied examples of glass formers in two dimensions. In this context we demonstrate here: (i) a…
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…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
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…
The glass transition is described in terms of thermally activated local structural rearrangements, the secondary relaxations of the glass phase. The interaction between these secondary relaxations leads to a much faster and much more…
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…
Despite decades of research, it remains to be established whether the transformation of a liquid into a glass is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While observations of growing length scales are consistent with thermodynamic…
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…
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…
The glass transition is considered as a phase transition in the system of topologically protected excitations in matter structure. The critical behavior of the system is considered both in statics and dynamics cases. It is shown in the…
The glass transition is the most enduring grand-challenge problem in contemporary condensed matter physics. Here, we review the contribution of colloid experiments to our understanding of this problem. First, we briefly outline the success…
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 numerically study the potential energy landscape of a fragile glassy system and find that the dynamic crossover corresponding to the glass transition is actually the effect of an underlying geometric transition caused by a qualitative…
The synergetic approach proposed here is based on characteristic instability of chemical bonding in the form of the bond wave considered as the spatiotemporal correlation between the elementary acts of bond exchange. In frames of the model,…
Key to resolving the scientific challenge of the glass transition is to understand the origin of the massive increase in viscosity of liquids cooled below their melting temperature (avoiding crystallisation). A number of competing and often…
We review phenomenological and microscopic theories of the structural glass transition
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…
We review the recently proposed elastic approach to glass transition. This approach is based on a simple and a physically transparent idea of elastic interactions between local relaxation events in a liquid. Central to this picture is 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…