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The configurational entropy is among the key observables to characterize experimentally the formation of a glass. Physically, it quantifies the multiplicity of metastable states in which an amorphous material can be found at a given…
Supercooled liquids are sometimes described as being composed of a mosaic of patches that may be listed in a `library', each one having some form of non-periodic order. Looking closer, one finds this construction elusive. In attempting to…
We propose a geometrical characterization of amorphous liquid structures that suppress crystallization by competing locally with crystalline order. We introduce for this purpose the crystal affinity of a liquid, a simple measure of its…
Thermodynamics provides a unified perspective of thermodynamic properties of various substances. To formulate thermodynamics in the language of sophisticated mathematics, thermodynamics is described by a variety of differential geometries,…
We performed calorimetric studies of 26 metallic glasses and calculated the excess entropy and excess enthalpy with respect to their counterpart crystals. On this basis, we introduced a dimensionless entropy-based parameter {\sigma}scl,…
Unlike molecular crystals, soft self-assembled fibres, micelles, vesicles, etc., exhibit a certain order in the arrangement of their constitutive monomers, but also high structural dynamicity and variability. Defects and disordered local…
Coordination geometries describe how the neighbours of a central particle are arranged around it. Such geometries can be thought to lie in an abstract topological space; a model of this space could provide a mathematical basis for…
In the framework of topological constraint theory, network glasses are classified as flexible, stressed--rigid, or isostatic if the number of atomic constraints is smaller, larger, or equal to the number of atomic degrees of freedom. Here,…
We show how growth by agglomeration can be described by means of algebraic or differential equations which determine the evolution of probabilities of various local configurations. The minimal fluctuation condition is used to define…
A directly measurable correlation length may be defined for systems having a two-step relaxation, based on the geometric properties of density profile that remains after averaging out the fast motion. We argue that the length diverges if…
Tackling the low-temperature fate of supercooled liquids is challenging due to the immense timescales involved, which prevent equilibration and lead to the operational glass transition. Relating glassy behaviour to an underlying,…
The competition between crystallization and vitrification in glass-forming materials manifests as a non-monotonic behavior in the time-temperature transformation (TTT) diagrams, which quantify the time scales for crystallization as a…
Phase fractions, compositions and energies of the stable phases as a function of macroscopic composition, temperature, and pressure (X-T-P) are the principle correlations needed for the design of new materials and improvement of existing…
Few questions in condensed matter science have proven as difficult to unravel as the interplay between structure and dynamics in supercooled liquids and glasses. The conundrum: close to the glass transition, the dynamics slow down…
We study the equilibrium statistical properties of the potential energy landscape of several glass models in a temperature regime so far inaccessible to computer simulations. We show that unstable modes of the stationary points undergo a…
The metastable states of a glass are counted by adding a weak pinning field which explicitly breaks the ergodicity. Their entropy, that is the logarithm of their number, is extensive in a range of temperatures $T_G < T < T_C$ only, where…
When liquids are cooled rapidly, they bypass crystallization and instead enter a supercooled state and then a glass state. Previous studies have shown that the static structure factors of high-temperature liquids, supercooled liquids, and…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
The early stage evolution of local atomic structures in a multicomponent metallic glass during its crystallization process has been investigated via molecular dynamics simulation. It is found that the initial thermal stability and earliest…
Molecular structure elucidation is a fundamental step in understanding chemical phenomena, with applications in identifying molecules in natural products, lab syntheses, forensic samples, and the interstellar medium. We consider the task of…