Related papers: Spatial structure of unstable normal modes in a gl…
Using computer simulations, we show that the localized low frequency normal modes of a configuration in a supercooled liquid are strongly correlated with the irreversible structural reorganization of the particles within that configuration.…
We consider unsupervised learning methods for characterizing the disordered microscopic structure of supercooled liquids and glasses. Specifically, we perform dimensionality reduction of smooth structural descriptors that describe radial…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to generate an ensemble of saddles of the potential energy of a Lennard-Jones liquid. Classifying all extrema by their potential energy u and number of unstable directions k, a well defined relation…
Motivated by recent experimental studies probing i) the existence of a mobile layer at the free surface of glasses, and ii) the capillary leveling of polymer nanofilms, we study the evolution of square-wave patterns at the free surface of a…
Recent experimental observations have demonstrated interesting instability phenomenon during thermal drawing of microstructured glass/polymer fibers, and these observations motivate us to examine surface-tension-driven instabilities in…
The plastic deformation of crystalline materials can be understood by considering their structural defects such as disclinations and dislocations. Although glasses are also solids, their structure resembles closely the one of a liquid and…
Using two extremely different models of glass formers in two and three dimensions we demonstrate how to encode the subtle changes in the geometric rearrangement of particles during the scenario of the glass transition. We construct a…
We propose and numerically implement a local probe of the static self-induced heterogeneity characterizing glass-forming liquids. The method relies on the equilibrium statistics of the overlap between pairs of configurations measured in…
Glass-forming liquids display strong fluctuations -- dynamical heterogeneities -- near their glass transition. By numerically simulating a binary Weeks-Chandler-Andersen liquid and varying both temperature and timescale, we investigate the…
Using positional data from video-microscopy of a two-dimensional colloidal system and from simulations of hard discs we determine the wave-vector-dependent normal mode spring constants in the supercooled fluid and glassy state,…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
Marginally stable solids have peculiar physical properties that were discovered and analyzed in the context of the jamming transition. We theoretically investigate the existence of marginal stability in a prototypical model for structural…
Using computer simulations of an atomistic glass-forming liquid, we investigate the fluctuations of the overlap between a fluid configuration and a quenched reference system. We find that large fluctuations of the overlap develop as…
A system is glassy when the observation time is much smaller than the equilibration time. A unifying thermodynamic picture of the glassy state is presented. Slow configurational modes are in quasi-equilibrium at an effective temperature. It…
We use the ``isoconfigurational ensemble'' [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 93}, 135701 (2004)] to analyze both dynamical and structural properties in simulations of a glass forming molecular liquid. We show that spatially correlated clusters of low…
The universal anomalous vibrational and thermal properties of amorphous solids are believed to be related to the local variations of the elasticity. Recently it has been shown that the vibrational properties are sensitive to the glass's…
We develop a theory of amorphous interfaces in glass-forming liquids. We show that the statistical properties of these surfaces, which separate regions characterized by different amorphous arrangements of particles, coincide with the ones…
We derive a microscopic theory for the structural dynamics in the vicinity of the glass transition for a liquid exposed to a one-dimensional periodic potential. The periodic potential breaks translational invariance, in particular, the…
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…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…