Related papers: Why is the Dynamics of Glasses Super-Arrhenius?
The routine transformation of a liquid, as it is cooled rapidly, resulting in glass formation, is remarkably complex. A theoretical explanation of the dynamics associated with this process has remained one of the major unsolved problems in…
Extensive computer simulations are performed for a few model glass-forming liquids in both two and three dimensions to study their dynamics when a randomly chosen fraction of particles are frozen in their equilibrium positions. For all the…
According to the Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory of glasses, the barriers for activated dynamics in supercooled liquids vanish as the temperature of a viscous liquid approaches the dynamical transition temperature from below.…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
The dramatic slowdown of glass-forming liquids has been variously linked to increasing dynamic and static correlation lengths. Yet, empirical evidence is insufficient to decide among competing theories. The random first order theory (RFOT)…
How does nonequilibrium activity modify the approach to a glass? This is an important question, since many experiments reveal the near-glassy nature of the cell interior, remodelled by activity. However, different simulations of dense…
The Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory of glasses provides a unified framework for explaining the observed correlations of the kinetic and thermodynamic behaviors of glass-forming liquids having a wide variety of chemical…
The Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory started with the pioneering work of Kirkpatrick, Thirumalai and Wolynes. It leverages the methods and advances of the theory of disordered systems. It fares remarkably well at reproducing the…
We analyze the ways in which the random first order phase transition (RFOT) of the glass transition differs from the well-studied regular first order and second order (or continuous) phase transitions. Just as is the case in the latter two…
Although several theories relate the steep slowdown of glass formers to increasing spatial correlations of some sort, standard static correlation functions show no evidence for this. We present results that reveal for the first time a…
A unified treatment of structural relaxation in a deeply supercooled glassy liquid is developed which extends the existing mode coupling theory (MCT) by incorporating the effects of activated events by using the concepts from the random…
The aim of this paper is to summarise the basic arguments and the intuition bolstering the RFOT picture for glasses, based on a finite dimensional extension of mean-field models with an exponentially large number of metastable states. We…
We use Brownian dynamics simulations of a binary mixture of highly charged spherical colloidal particles to illustrate many of the implications of the Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory (PRA 40 1045 (1989)), which is the only…
While the transformation of flowing liquids into rigid glasses is omnipresent, a complete understanding of vitrification remains elusive. Of the numerous approaches aimed at solving the glass transition problem, the Random First-Order…
It was recently discovered that SWAP, a Monte Carlo algorithm that involves the exchange of pairs of particles of differing diameters, can dramatically accelerate the equilibration of simulated supercooled liquids in regimes where the…
A major mystery of glass-forming liquids is the non-Arrhenius temperature-dependence of the average relaxation time. This paper briefly reviews the classical phenomenological models for this phenomenon - the free-volume model and the…
Generic glass formers exhibit at least two characteristic changes in their relaxation behavior, first to an Arrhenius-type relaxation at some characteristic temperature, and then at a lower characteristic temperature to a super-Arrhenius…
When a liquid is cooled below its melting temperature, if crystallization is avoided, it forms a glass. This phenomenon, called glass transition, is characterized by a marked increase of viscosity, about 14 orders of magnitude, in a narrow…
We review the recently proposed elastic approach to glass transition. This approach is based on a simple and a physically transparent idea of elastic interactions between local relaxation events in a liquid. Central to this picture is the…
Dynamics near the surface of glasses is generally much faster than in the bulk. Neglecting static perturbations of structure at the surface, we use random first order transition theory to show the free energy barrier for activated motion…