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While diffusion in crystalline solids is quantitatively understood through defect-mediated atomic hops, no comparable quantitative framework exists for glasses. In these systems, the origin of large diffusion activation energies remains…
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic…
Condensed ionic systems are described in the framework of a combined approach that takes into account both long-range and short-range interactions. Short-range interaction is expressed in terms of mean potentials and long-range interaction…
The relationship between the microscopic arrangement of molecules in a supercooled liquid and its slow dynamics at low temperature near glass transition is studied by Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. A Lennard-Jones liquid with…
The underlying structural order that transcends the liquid, glass and crystalline states is identified using an efficient genetic algorithm (GA). GA identifies the most common energetically favorable packing motif in crystalline structures…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
We report a molecular dynamics (MD) study of the collective dynamics of a simple monatomic liquid -interacting through a two body potential that mimics that of lithium- across the liquid-glass transition. In the glassy phase we find…
A cardinal obstacle to understanding and predicting quantitatively the properties of solids and large molecules is that, for these systems, it is very challenging to describe beyond the mean-field level the quantum-mechanical interactions…
Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Understanding glass formation by quenching remains a challenge in soft condensed matter physics. Recent numerical studies on steepest descent dynamics, which is one of the simplest models of quenching, revealed that quenched liquids undergo…
An elementary understanding of the relevant length, mass and energy scales at the molecular level can be used to explain the order of magnitude of material properties such as mass density, latent heat, surface tension, elastic moduli and…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
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,…
This is the manuscript of my "Habilitation \`a diriger des recherches", where I present the research work that I have done after my PhD, defended in 2009. The manuscript is divided in two parts. The first one is dedicated to…
Regulation of material softness has both theoretical and practical significances due to irreplaceable applications of soft matter in rather diverse areas. This article is dedicated to draft a theoretical category on interpreting the…
An analytical framework is proposed to describe the elasticity, viscosity and fragility of metallic glasses in relation to their atomic-level structure and the effective interatomic interaction. The bottom-up approach starts with forming an…
The quantum excitations in glasses have long presented a set of puzzles for condensed matter physicists. A common view is that they are largely disordered analogs of elementary excitations in crystals, supplemented by two level systems…
We present molecular simulation data for viscosity, self-diffusivity, and the local structural ordering of (i) a hard-sphere fluid and (ii) a square-well fluid with short-range attractions. The latter fluid exhibits a region of dynamic…