Related papers: Is glass a state of matter?
Key to resolving the scientific challenge of the glass transition is to understand the origin of the massive increase in viscosity of liquids cooled below their melting temperature (avoiding crystallisation). A number of competing and often…
Rapid cooling of liquids below a certain temperature range can result in a transition to glassy states. The traditional understanding of glasses includes their thermodynamic metastability with respect to crystals. However, here we present…
Supersolidity of glasses is explained as a property of an unusual state of condensed matter. This state is essentially different from both normal and superfluid solid states. The mechanism of the phenomenon is the transfer of mass by…
This is a short account of the basic principles of a comprehensive theory of the vitreous state, looking at glasses and their eventual <<melting>> into a liquid state (the inverse glass <<transition>>) from the perspective of their…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
When we lower the temperature of a liquid, at some point we meet a first order phase transition to the crystal. Yet, under certain conditions it is possible to keep the system in its metastable phase and to avoid crystallization. In this…
Metallic glasses are formed by splat-cooling; this ensures that atomic motions are arrested before the latent heat of solidification can be extracted. Glass is defined as a higher disorder metastable state with arrested kinetics. Arrested…
We use computer simulations to investigate the static properties of a simple glass-forming fluid in which the positions of a finite fraction of the particles has been frozen in. By probing the equilibrium distribution of the overlap between…
Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…
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…
Many properties of solids such as the glass state are commonly treated as nonequilibrium phenomena, which involve many conceptual difficulties. However, few studies have addressed the problem of understanding equilibrium itself. Equilibrium…
In order to understand the long-standing problem of the nature of glass states, we performed intensive simulations on the thermodynamic properties and potential energy surface of an ideal glass. We found that the atoms of an ideal glass…
The synergetic approach proposed here is based on characteristic instability of chemical bonding in the form of the bond wave considered as the spatiotemporal correlation between the elementary acts of bond exchange. In frames of the model,…
Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter remain subject to debate: Glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…
We use computer simulations to probe the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of a glass-former that undergoes an ideal glass-transition because of the presence of randomly pinned particles. We find that even deep in the equilibrium glass…
Glasses constitute a widespread form of solid matter, and glass production has been an important human technology for more than 3000 years. Despite that long history, new ways to understand the fundamental physics of glasses continue to…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
When a liquid is cooled below its melting temperature it usually crystallizes. However, if the quenching rate is fast enough, it is possible that the system remains in a disordered state, progressively losing its fluidity upon further…