Related papers: Quantifying `local softness' in a simple liquid
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
We consider a linearly thermoelastic composite medium,which consists of a homogeneous matrix containing a statistically inhomogeneous random set of inclusions, when the concentration of the inclusions is a function of the coordinates…
The distribution of local residual stresses (threshold to instability) that controls the statistical properties of plastic flow in athermal amorphous solids is examined with an atomistic simulation technique. For quiescent configurations,…
The yielding of foams, concentrated emulsions, pastes and other soft materials under applied strain is often characterized by measuring the complex shear modulus as a function of strain amplitude at low frequency. Results obtained for…
I briefly review a recent series of papers putting forward a coarse-grained theoretical approach to the physics of supercooled liquids approaching their glass transition. After a suitable coarse-graining, the dynamics of the liquid is…
The thermodynamics and mechanics of the surface of a deformable body are studied here, following and refining the general approach of Gibbs. It is first shown that the 'local' thermodynamic variables of the state of the surface are only the…
The aim of this paper is to calculate the time dependence of the mean position (and orientation) of a fluid particle when a fluid system at thermodynamic equilibrium is submitted to a mechanical action. The starting point of this novel…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Identifying heterogeneous structures in glasses --- such as localized soft spots --- and understanding structure-dynamics relations in these systems remain major scientific challenges. Here we derive an exact expression for the local…
From bone and wood to concrete and carbon fibre, composites are ubiquitous natural and engineering materials. Eshelby's inclusion theory describes how macroscopic stress fields couple to isolated microscopic inclusions, allowing prediction…
We examine the phenomenon of dynamical heterogeneity in computer simulations of an equilibrium, glass-forming liquid. We describe several approaches to quantify the spatial correlation of single-particle motion, and show that spatial…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
We explore the relationship between a machine-learned structural quantity (softness) and excess entropy in simulations of supercooled liquids. Excess entropy is known to scale well the dynamical properties of liquids, but this…
We examine the dynamics of hard spheres and discs at high packing fractions in two and three dimensions, modeling the simplest systems exhibiting a glass transition. As it is well known, cooperativity and dynamic heterogeneity arise as…
Controlling polymorphism in molecular crystals is crucial in the pharmaceutical, dye, and pesticide industries. However, its theoretical description is extremely challenging, due to the associated long timescales ($ > 1 \, \mu s$). We…
The phenomenon of solidification of a substance from its liquid phase is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance, and atomistic simulations can provide precious information towards its understanding and control. Unfortunately,…
The persistent problem posed by the glass transition is to develop a general atomic level description of a solidification process that is not associated with any change in the symmetry of the atomic structure. The answer proposed in this…
A vibrational model of heat transfer in simple liquids with soft pairwise interatomic interactions is discussed. A general expression is derived, which involves an averaging over the liquid collective mode excitation spectrum. The model is…
Machine learning techniques have been used to quantify the relationship between local structural features and variations in local dynamical activity in disordered glass-forming materials. To date these methods have been applied to an array…