Related papers: Excitation Populations Provide a Thermodynamic Ord…

Low-energy excitations play a key role in all condensed-matter systems, yet there is limited understanding of their nature in glasses, where they correspond to local rearrangements of groups of particles. Here we introduce an algorithm to…

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…

We study the role of elasticity-induced facilitation on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids by a coarse-grained two-dimensional model in which local relaxation events, taking place by thermal activation, can trigger new relaxations by…

We propose a computational strategy to quantify the temperature evolution of the timescales and lengthscales over which dynamic facilitation affects the relaxation dynamics of glass-forming liquids at low temperatures, that requires no…

We connect the configurational entropy of a liquid to the geometrical properties of its local energy landscape, using a high-temperature expansion. It is proposed that correlations between local structures arises from their overlap and,…

We describe a model for the thermodynamics and dynamics of glass-forming liquids in terms of excitations from an ideal glass state to a Gaussian manifold of configurationally excited states. The quantitative fit of this three parameter…

We present a study of two model liquids with different interaction potentials, exhibiting similar structure but significantly different dynamics at low temperatures. By evaluating the configurational entropy, we show that the differences in…

Thermodynamics and kinetics are thought to be linked in glass transitions. The quantitative predictions of -relaxation activation barriers provided by the theory of glasses based on random first order transitions are compared with…

We numerically elucidate the microscopic mechanisms controlling the relaxation dynamics of a three-dimensional lattice glass model that has static properties compatible with the approach to a random first-order transition. At low…

The dramatic slowdown of dynamics in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition remains one of the central unresolved problems in condensed matter physics. We review approaches that attribute this slowdown to growing thermodynamic…

We consider the effect of droplet excitations in the random first order transition theory of glasses on the configurational entropy. The contribution of these excitations is estimated both at and above the ideal glass transition…

The expression of the free energy of a liquid in terms of an explicit decomposition of the particle configurations into local coordination clusters is examined. We argue that the major contribution to the entropy associated with structural…

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…

Emergence and maintenance of excitability is often phrased in terms of arriving at and remaining about a manifold of 'solutions' embedded in a high dimensional parameter space. Alongside studies that extend traditional focus on…

Diffusivity, a measure for how rapidly a fluid self-mixes, shows an intimate, but seemingly fragmented, connection to thermodynamics. On one hand, the "configurational" contribution to entropy (related to the number of mechanically-stable…

Using very long molecular dynamics simulation runs, temperature protocols spanning up to five orders of magnitude in time-scales are performed to investigate thermally activated structural relaxation in a model amorphous solid. The…

We investigate the local structural fluctuations of a model equilibrium fluid with an aim of better understanding the structural basis of locally heterogeneous dynamics identified in recent simulations and experimental studies of…

We compare a recent excitation chain argument for the glass transition with the earlier random first order transition theory. The key equation determining the activation barriers and size of cooperatively rearranging regions has the same…

The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, {\it via} a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations…

As liquids approach the glass transition temperature, dynamical heterogeneity emerges as a crucial universal feature of their behavior. Dynamic facilitation, where local motion triggers further motion nearby, plays a major role in this…