Related papers: Exploring canyons in glassy energy landscapes usin…
Glass is a microscopically disordered, solid form of matter that results when a fluid is cooled or compressed in such a fashion that it does not crystallise. Almost all types of materials are capable of glass formation -- polymers, metal…
The thermodynamic and kinetic anomalies of supercooled liquids are analyzed from the perspective of energy landscapes. A mean field model, a generalized random energy model of liquids is developed, which exhibits a dynamical transition of…
We introduce an efficient and accurate alternative to full hydrodynamic simulations, Hydro-PM (HPM), for the study of the low column density Lyman-alpha forest. It consists of a Particle-Mesh solver, modified to compute, in addition to the…
Foams and dense emulsions display complex mechanical behavior, including intermittent rearrangement dynamics, power-law rheology, and slow recovery after perturbation. These effects have long been considered evidence for glassy physics in…
The notion of complex energy landscape underpins the intriguing dynamical behaviors in many complex systems ranging from polymers, to brain activity, to social networks and glass transitions. The spin glass state found in dilute magnetic…
The glass transition of a hard sphere system is investigated within the framework of the density functional theory (DFT). Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are performed to study dynamical behavior of the system on the one hand and to…
The complex dynamics of an increasing number of systems is attributed to the emergence of a rugged energy landscape with an exponential number of metastable states. To develop this picture into a predictive dynamical theory I discuss how to…
Glassy behavior is one of the main open problems in condensed matter physics. In this thesis, we approach the problem by studying spin-glasses and colloids, using several complementary strategies. From the point of view of model building,…
Metadynamics, a member of the `flat histogram' class of advanced sampling algorithms, has been widely used in molecular simulations to drive the exploration of states separated by high free energy barriers and promote comprehensive sampling…
Polymorphism rationalizes how processing can control the final structure of a material. The rugged free-energy landscape and exceedingly slow kinetics in the solid state have so far hampered computational investigations. We report for the…
High-dimensional random landscapes underlie phenomena as diverse as glassy physics and optimization in machine learning, and even their simplest toy models already display extraordinarily rich behavior. This thesis aims to deepen our…
We study signatures of the energy landscape's evolution through the crystal-to-glass transition by compressing 2D finite aggregates of oil droplets. Droplets of two distinct sizes are used to compose small aggregates in an aqueous…
The equilibrium state of a superfluid in a rotating cylindrical vessel is a vortex crystal -- an array of vortex lines which is stationary in the rotating frame. Experimental realisations of this behaviour typically show a sequence of…
Kinetically constrained models (KCM) are systems with trivial thermodynamics but often complex dynamical behavior due to constraints on the accessible paths followed by the system. Exploring these properties, the Kob-Andersen (KA) model was…
We show how dynamical heterogeneities in glass forming systems emerge as a consequence of the existence of dynamical constraints, and we offer an interpretation of the glass transition as an entropy crisis in trajectory space (space-time)…
We analyze the energy barriers that allow escapes from a given local minimum in a mean-field model of glasses. We perform this study by using the Kac-Rice method and computing the typical number of critical points of the energy function at…
For amorphous solids, it has been intensely debated whether the traditional view on solids, in terms of the ground state and harmonic low energy excitations on top of it, such as phonons, is still valid. Recent theoretical developments of…
We numerically analyse the landscape governing the evolution of the vibrational dynamics of hard disk glasses as the density increases towards jamming. We find that the dynamics becomes slow, spatially correlated, and starts to display…
The energy landscape picture is a central tool to study many-body systems. In particular, the energy landscapes of glass-forming liquids, jammed packings, constraint satisfaction problems, or neural networks contain a plethora of minima…
The Voronoi model is a popular tool for studying confluent living tissues. It exhibits an anomalous glassy behavior even at very low temperatures or weak active self-propulsion, and at zero temperature the model exhibits a disordered solid…