Related papers: Rare Trajectories in a Prototypical Mean-field Dis…
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…
At the mean-field level, on fully connected lattices, several disordered spin models have been shown to belong to the universality class of "structural glasses", with a "random first-order transition" (RFOT) characterized by a discontinuous…
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…
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 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…
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…
Understanding structural glasses using the Random First Order Transition theory requires a description in both real space and in time, taking into account sample history. A variety of nonlinear objects enter this description, in field…
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…
Instantons, semi-classical trajectories of quantum tunneling in imaginary time, have long been used to study thermodynamic and transport properties in a myriad of condensed matter and high energy systems. A recent experiment in…
Dense active matter, in the fluid or amorphous-solid form, has generated intense interest as a model for the dynamics inside living cells and multicellular systems. An extension of the random first-order transition theory (RFOT) to include…
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)…
We develop a real space renormalisation group analysis of disordered models of glasses, in particular of the spin models at the origin of the Random First Order Transition theory. We find three fixed points respectively associated to the…
Mean-field models of glasses that present a random first order transition exhibit highly non-trivial fluctuations. Building on previous studies that focused on the critical scaling regime, we here obtain a fully quantitative framework for…
We study thermally activated dynamics using functional renormalization within the field theory of randomly pinned elastic systems, a prototype for glasses. It appears through an essentially non-perturbative boundary layer in the running…
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…
We focus on the energy landscape of a simple mean-field model of glasses and analyze activated barrier-crossing by combining the Kac-Rice method for high-dimensional Gaussian landscapes with dynamical field theory. In particular, we…
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…
Instantons and renormalons play important roles at the interface between perturbative and non-perturbative quantum field theory. They are both associated with branch points in the Borel transform of asymptotic series, and as such can be…
The steep increase of the relaxation time of glass forming liquids upon cooling is traditionally ascribed to an impending entropy crisis: since the system has "nowhere to go", dynamics must come to a halt. This classic argument, due to Adam…
A disordered spin model suitable for studying inverse freezing in fragile glass-forming systems is introduced. The model is a microscopic realization of the ``random-first order'' scenario in which the glass transition can be either…