Related papers: Different glassy characteristics are related to ei…

In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…

Dynamical systems of the gauge glass are investigated by the method of the gauge transformation.Both stochastic and deterministic dynamics are treated. Several exact relations are derived among dynamical quantities such as equilibrium and…

The study of spin-glass dynamics, long considered the paradigmatic complex system, has reached important milestones. The availability of single crystals has allowed the experimental measurement of spin-glass coherence lengths of almost…

The similarity in atomic structure between liquids and glasses has stimulated a long-standing hypothesis that the nature of glasses may be more fluid like, rather than an apparent solid. In principle, the nature of glasses can be…

We show that there are several striking parallels between the dynamics of gelatin gels and spin glasses. In general, glassy systems retain a memory of their past history. A key characteristic differentiating spin glasses from most other…

The interrelation of dynamic processes active on separated time-scales in glasses and viscous liquids is investigated using a model displaying two time-scale bifurcations both between fast and secondary relaxation and between secondary and…

The presence of strong local fluctuations -- dynamical heterogeneities -- has been observed near the glass transitions of a wide variety of materials. Here we explore the possible presence of universality in those fluctuations. We compare…

Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…

Fickian yet non-Gaussian diffusion is observed in several biological and soft matter systems, yet the underlying mechanisms behind the emergence of non-Gaussianity while retaining a linear mean square displacement remain speculative. Here,…

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…

Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among…

Dynamic facilitation theory assumes short-ranged dynamic constraints to be the essential feature of supercooled liquids and draws much of its conclusions from the study of kinetically constrained models. While deceptively simple, these…

Elastic models of the glass transition relate the relaxation dynamics and the elastic properties of structural glasses. They are based on the assumption that the relaxation dynamics occurs through activated events in the energy landscape…

The emergence of nanoscience has increased the importance of experiments able to probe the very local structure of materials, especially for disordered and heterogeneous systems. This is technologically important; for example, the nanoscale…

The mechanical properties of cells, which influence the properties of the tissue they belong to, are controlled by various mechanisms. Bi et al. theoretically demonstrated that density-independent rigidity transition occurs in…

We show the existence of intermittent dynamics in one of the simplest model of a glassy system: the two-state model, which has been used to explain the origin of the violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The dynamics is analyzed…

The physics of how molecules, organelles, and foreign objects move within living cells has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to human cells. In mammalian cells, in particular, cellular vesicles move across the cell…

The dynamics of a tagged particle immersed in a fluid of particles of the same size but different mass is studied when the system is confined between two hard parallel plates separated a distance smaller than twice the diameter of the…

As approaching the glass transition, particle motion in liquids becomes highly heterogeneous and regions with virtually no mobility coexist with liquid-like domains. This complex dynamics is believed to be responsible for different…

The topic of the glass transition gives rise to a a wide diversity of views. It is, accordingly, characterized by a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical perspective. In this chapter, I provide some elements…