Related papers: Unexpected ductility in semiflexible polymer glass…
In this Perspective, I describe recent work on systems in which the traditional distinctions between (i) unentangled vs. well-entangled systems and (ii) melts vs. glasses seem least useful, and argue for the broader use in glassy polymer…
Glassiness occurs when disorder and frustration cause local degrees of freedom to freeze despite the lack of long-range order. In systems of interacting bosons, such glassiness may involve a purely quantum degree of…
The effect of cooling on the brittleness of glasses in general, and bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) in particular, is usually studied with continuously varying cooling rates; slower cooling rates lead to stiffer, harder, and more brittle…
Quantitative understanding of the fracture toughness of metallic glasses, including the associated ductile-to-brittle transitions, is not yet available. Here we use a simple model of plastic deformation in glasses, coupled to an advanced…
Recent computational and laboratory experiments have shown that the brittle-ductile transitions in metallic glasses such as Vitreloy1 are strongly sensitive to the initial effective disorder (or "fictive") temperature. Glasses with lower…
Polymer composite materials are widely used for their exceptional mechanical properties, notably their ability to resist large deformations. Here we examine the failure stress and strain of rubbers reinforced by varying amounts of…
Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for…
The nematic ordering in semiflexible polymers with contour length $L$ exceeding their persistence length $\ell_p$ is described by a confinement of the polymers in a cylinder of radius $r_{eff}$ much larger than the radius $r_\rho$, expected…
Polymeric single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) are soft nano-objects synthesized by purely intramolecular cross-linking of single polymer chains. By means of computer simulations, we investigate the conformational properties of SCNPs as a…
While the dynamics of a fully flexible polymer ejecting a capsid through a nanopore has been extensively studied, the ejection dynamics of semiflexible polymers has not been properly characterized. Here we report results from simulations of…
Glass stability (GS) indicates the glass reluctance or ability to crystallise upon heating; it can be characterised by several methods and parameters and is frequently used to retrieve glass-forming ability (GFA) of corresponding liquids as…
We present here a new mechanism of high-T_c (critical temperature) superconductivity. This new model is able to explain all the HTSC (high-T_c superconductivity) properties, like high T_c, origin and nature of NSPG (normal state pseudogap),…
We investigate the response of a system of hard spheres to two classes of perturbations over a range of densities spanning the fluid, crystalline, and glassy regimes within a molecular dynamics framework. Firstly, we consider the relaxation…
Evaporating droplets of polymer or colloid solution may produce a glassy crust at the liquid-vapour interface, which subsequently deforms as an elastic shell. For sessile droplets, the known radial outward flow of solvent is expected to…
Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…
The specific heat capacity $c_v$ of glass formers undergoes a hysteresis when subjected to a cooling-heating cycle, with a larger $c_v$ and a more pronounced hysteresis for fragile glasses than for strong ones. Here, we show that these…
We have connected the dynamic fragility, namely the rapidity of the relaxation time increase upon temperature reduction, to the excess entropy and heat capacity of a large number of glass-forming polymers. The connection was obtained in a…
We investigate the structure of metastable states in self-generated Coulomb glasses. In dramatic contrast to disordered electron glasses, we find that these states lack marginal stability. Such absence of marginal stability is reflected by…
A spin glass is a diluted magnetic material in which the magnetic moments are randomly interacting, with a huge number of metastable states which prevent reaching equilibrium. Spin-glass models are conceptually simple, but require very…
We compute for an archetypical glass-forming system the excess of particle mobility distributions over the corresponding distribution of dynamic propensity, a quantity that measures the tendency of the particles to be mobile and reflects…