Related papers: Exploring canyons in glassy energy landscapes usin…
Supercooled liquids are kinetically trapped materials in which the transition to a thermodynamically more stable state with long-range order is strongly suppressed. To assess the glass-forming abilities of a liquid empirical rules exist,…
Glass is an under-cooled liquid that very slowly relaxes towards the equilibrium crystalline state. Its energy balance is ill understood, since it is widely believed that the glassy state cannot be described thermodynamically. However, the…
Describing the complex landscape of infinite-dimensional free energy is generally a challenging problem. This difficulty arises from the existence of numerous minimizers and, consequently, a vast number of saddle points. These factors make…
We review the use of kinetically constrained models (KCMs) for the study of dynamics in glassy systems. The characteristic feature of KCMs is that they have trivial, often non-interacting, equilibrium behaviour but interesting slow dynamics…
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…
We consider the theory of the glass phase and jamming of hard spheres in the large space dimension limit. Building upon the exact expression for the free-energy functional obtained previously, we find that the Random First Order Transition…
In this paper we expose the results of our recent work on the dynamical TAP approach to mean field glassy systems. Our aim is to clarify the connection between free energy landscape and out of equilibrium dynamics in solvable models.…
A free-energy functional that contains both the symmetry conserved and symmetry broken parts of the direct pair correlation function has been used to investigate the freezing of a system of hard spheres into crystalline and amorphous…
Characterizing crystalline energy landscapes is essential to predicting thermodynamic stability, electronic structure, and functional behavior. While machine learning (ML) enables rapid property predictions, the "black-box" nature of most…
Using a distinguishable-particle lattice model based on void-induced dynamics, we successfully reproduce the well-known linear relation between heat capacity and temperature at very low temperatures. The heat capacity is dominated by…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation study of the properties of the potential energy landscape sampled by a system of water molecules during the process of generating a glass by cooling, and during the process of regenerating the…
Kinetically constrained models (KCM) generically have trivial thermodynamics and yet manifest rich glassy dynamics. In order to resolve the thermodynamics-dynamics disconnect in KCMs, we derive a KCM by coarse-graining a non-trivial…
Spin-glass systems are universal models for representing many-body phenomena in statistical physics and computer science. High quality solutions of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be encoded into low energy states of…
Sampling from discrete distributions with multiple modes and energy barriers is fundamental to machine learning and computational physics. Recent discrete neural samplers like MDNS suffer from mode collapse and fail to sample high-energy…
The accuracy of the energy landscape of silicon systems obtained from various density functional methods, a tight binding scheme and force fields is studied. Quantum Monte Carlo results serve as quasi exact reference values. In addition to…
Relaxation phenomena in glasses can be related to jump processes between different minima of the potential energy in the configuration space. These transitions play a key role in the low temperature regime, giving rise to tunneling systems…
Encoding the complex features of an energy landscape is a challenging task, and often chemists pursue the most salient features (minima and barriers) along a highly reduced space, i.e. 2- or 3-dimensions. Even though disconnectivity graphs…
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…
In these lectures I will present an introduction to the modern way of studying the properties of glassy systems. I will start from soluble models of increasing complications, the Random Energy Model, the $p$-spins interacting model and I…
We present a simple model system with four hard disks moving in a circular region for which free energy landscapes can be directly calculated and visualized in two and three dimensions. We construct several energy landscapes for our system…