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When liquids are cooled sufficiently rapidly below their melting temperature, they may bypass crystalization and, instead, enter a long-lived metastable supercooled state that has long been the focus of intense research. Although they…
Monodisperse ensembles of particles that have cluster crystalline phases at low temperatures can model a number of physical systems, such as vortices in type-1.5 superconductors, colloidal suspensions and cold atoms. In this work we study a…
The physical behavior of glass-forming liquids presents complex features of both dynamic and thermodynamic nature. Some studies indicate the presence of thermodynamic anomalies and of crossovers in the dynamic properties, but their origin…
A simple, non-disordered spin model has been studied in an effort to understand the origin of the precipitous slowing down of dynamics observed in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition. A combination of Monte Carlo…
Analyzing the atomic structure of glassy materials is a tremendous challenge both experimentally and computationally, and the lack of direct, detailed insights into glass structure hinders our ability to navigate structure-property…
Despite their technological relevance, a full microscopic understanding of glasses is still lacking. This applies even more to their surfaces whose properties largely differ from that of the bulk material. Here, we experimentally…
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,…
A core-softened model of a glass forming fluid is numerically studied in the limit of very low temperatures. The model shows two qualitatively different behaviors depending on the strength of the attraction between particles. For no or low…
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…
We report a metadynamics simulation study of crystallization in a deep undercooled metallic glass-forming liquid by developing appropriate collective variables. Through a combined analysis of free energy surface (FES) and atomic-level…
Glass-forming liquids have only a modest tendency to crystallize and hence their dynamics can be studied even below the melting temperature. The relaxation dynamics of most of these liquids shows at a temperature $T_c$, somewhat above the…
We develop a new numerical scheme which allows precise solution of coherent tunneling problems, i.e., problems with exponentially small transition amplitudes between quasidegenerate states. We explain how this method works for 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…
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…
Below the melting temperature $T_m$ crystals are the stable phase of typical elemental or molecular systems. However, cooling down a liquid below $T_m$, crystallization is anything but inevitable. The liquid can be supercooled, eventually…
All liquids (except helium due to quantum effects) crystallize at low temperatures, forming ordered structures. The competition between disorder, which stabilizes the liquid phase, and energy, which favors the ordered crystalline structure,…
We have studied the possible existence of a supersolid phase of a two-dimensional dipolar crystal using quantum Monte Carlo methods at zero temperature. Our results show that the commensurate solid is not a supersolid in the thermodynamic…
We performed calorimetric studies of 26 metallic glasses and calculated the excess entropy and excess enthalpy with respect to their counterpart crystals. On this basis, we introduced a dimensionless entropy-based parameter {\sigma}scl,…
Advances in scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveal the presence of superconducting nanoregions well past the bulk thermal transition in strongly disordered superconductors. We use a Monte Carlo tool to capture the spatially differentiated…
Point defects in self-assembled crystals, such as vacancies and interstitials, attract each other and form stable clusters. This leads to a phase separation between perfect crystalline structures and defect conglomerates at low…