Related papers: Spatial structure of unstable normal modes in a gl…
For several atomistic models of glass formers, at conditions below their glassy dynamics onset temperatures, ${T_\mathrm{o}}$, we use importance sampling of trajectory space to study the structure, statistics and dynamics of excitations…
In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet,…
Besides the dynamical slowing down signaled by an enormous increase of the viscosity approaching the glass transition, structural glasses show interesting anomalous thermodynamic features at low temperatures that hint at peculiar deviations…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
The transition of a fluid to a rigid glass upon cooling is a common route of transformation from liquid to solid that embodies the most poorly understood features of both phases1,2,3. From the liquid perspective, the puzzle is to understand…
We study heterogeneities in a binary Lennard-Jones system below the glass transition using molecular dynamics simulations. We identify mobile and immobile particles and measure their distribution of vibrational amplitudes. For temperatures…
We construct a mean field theory for the lattice model of a structural glass and solve it using the replica method and one step replica symmetry breaking ansatz; this theory becomes exact in the limit of infinite dimensions. Analyzing…
Understanding glass formation by quenching remains a challenge in soft condensed matter physics. Recent numerical studies on steepest descent dynamics, which is one of the simplest models of quenching, revealed that quenched liquids undergo…
We introduce a three replica potential useful to examine the structure of metastables states above the static transition temperature, in the spherical p-spin model. Studying the minima of the potential we are able to find which is the…
We study the local dynamical fluctuations in glass-forming models of particles embedded in $d$-dimensional space, in the mean-field limit of $d\to\infty$. Our analytical calculation reveals that single-particle observables, such as squared…
The dynamics of glass formation in monatomic and binary liquids are studied numerically using a microscopic field theory for the evolution of the time-averaged atomic number density. A stochastic framework combining phase field crystal free…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
We introduce a new quantity to probe the glass transition. This quantity is a linear generalized compressibility which depends solely on the positions of the particles. We have performed a molecular dynamics simulation on a glass forming…
The shapes of cooperatively rearranging regions in glassy liquids change from being compact at low temperatures to fractal or ``stringy'' as the dynamical crossover temperature from activated to collisional transport is approached from…
We analyse the connections between structure and dynamics in two model glass-formers, using the mutual information between an initial configuration and the ensuing dynamics to compare the predictive value of different structural…
The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all…
The inherent structure approach, wherein thermodynamic and structural changes in glass forming liquids are analyzed in terms of local potential energy minima that the liquid samples, has recently been applied extensively to the study of…
A new connection between structure and dynamics in glass-forming liquids is presented. We show how the origin of spatially localized excitations, as defined by dynamical facilitation (DF) theory, can be understood from a structure-based…
The configurational entropy is among the key observables to characterize experimentally the formation of a glass. Physically, it quantifies the multiplicity of metastable states in which an amorphous material can be found at a given…
An analytical model of non-Gaussian energy landscape of low-temperature fluids is developed based on the thermodynamics of the fluid of dipolar hard spheres. The entire excitation profile of the liquid, from the high temperatures to the…