Related papers: Creating equilibrium glassy states via random part…
The recent experimental fabrication of ultra stable glass films via vapour deposition [Science 315, 353 (2007)] and the observation of front-like response to the annealing of these films [Phys.Rev.Lett. 102, 065503 (2009)], have raised…
By mixing glass beads with a curable polymer we create a well-defined cohesive granular medium, held together by solidified, and hence elastic, capillary bridges. This material has a geometry similar to a wet packing of beads, but with an…
It is shown that electrostatic and diamagnetic forces can combine to give long lasting metastable bound dimers of macro and mesoscopically sized objects for a physically attainable material regime. This can be a large enough effect to…
We propose and analyze a mathematical model of the mechanics of gels, consisting of the laws of balance of mass and linear momentum. We consider a gel to be an immiscible and incompressible mixture of a nonlinearly elastic polymer and a…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
We study the nonlinear dynamics of a multi-mode random laser using the methods of statistical physics of disordered systems. A replica-symmetry breaking phase transition is predicted as a function of the pump intensity. We thus show that…
Polymer models are used to describe chromatin, which can be folded at different spatial scales by binding molecules. By folding, chromatin generates loops of various sizes. We present here a randomly cross-linked (RCL) polymer model, where…
Reconstructing a density of states or similar distribution from moments or continued fractions is an important problem in calculating the electronic and vibrational structure of defective or non-crystalline solids. For single bands a…
The formation of molecules and supramolecular structures results from bonding by conservative forces acting among electrons and nuclei and giving rise to equilibrium configurations defined by minima of the interaction potential. Here we…
When a colloidal suspension is dried, capillary pressure may overwhelm repulsive electrostatic forces, assembling aggregates that are out of thermal equilibrium. This poorly understood process confers cohesive strength to many geological…
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,…
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…
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…
Colloidal glasses form from hard spheres, nearly hard spheres, ellipsoids and platelets or their attractive variants have been studied in detail. Complementing and checking theoretical approaches and simulations, the many different types of…
The art of making structural, polymeric and metallic glasses is rapidly developing with many applications. A limitation to their use is their mechanical stability: under increasing external strain all amorphous solids respond elastically to…
Quantum droplets are ultradilute liquid states which emerge from the competitive interplay of two Hamiltonian terms, the mean-field energy and beyond-mean-field correction, in a weakly interacting binary Bose gas. We relate the formation of…
When nematic liquid crystals are embedded in random polymer networks, the disordered environment disrupts the long-range order, producing a glassy state. If an electric field is applied, it induces large and fairly temperature-independent…
We propose a method to generate arbitrary symmetric states of N qubits, which can be easily associated with their entanglement classes. It is particularly suited to quantum optics systems like trapped ions or superconducting circuits. We…
When classical systems fail to explore their entire configurational space, intriguing macroscopic phenomena like aging and glass formation may emerge. Also closed quanto-mechanical systems may stop wandering freely around the whole Hilbert…
The transition of a fluid to a rigid glass upon cooling is a common route of transformation from liquid to solid that embodies the most poorly understood features of both phases1,2,3. From the liquid perspective, the puzzle is to understand…