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Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses remains elusive since the glass transition itself is not fully understood, even in well studied examples of glass formers in two dimensions. In this context we demonstrate here: (i) a…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
We investigate the characteristic length scales associated with the glass transition phenomenon. By studying an atomic glass-forming liquid in negatively curved space, for which the local order is well identified and the amount of…
The persistent problem posed by the glass transition is to develop a general atomic level description of a solidification process that is not associated with any change in the symmetry of the atomic structure. The answer proposed in this…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
The glass transition can simply be viewed as the point at which the viscosity of a structurally disordered liquid reaches 10^{13} Poise [1]. This definition is operational but it sidesteps fundamental controversies about the glass: Is the…
Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems aging under the crystallization threat. During ordinary glass formation, the atomic diffusion slows down rendering its experimental investigation impractically long, to the extent that a timescale…
Using positional data from video-microscopy of a two-dimensional colloidal system and from simulations of hard discs we determine the wave-vector-dependent normal mode spring constants in the supercooled fluid and glassy state,…
The glass transition remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of contemporary condensed matter physics. When crystallization is bypassed by rapid cooling, a supercooled liquid, retaining amorphous particle arrangment, results. The…
Sheared multi-component bulk metallic glasses are characterized by both chemical and structural disorder that define their properties. We investigate the behavior of the local, microstructural elastic modulus across the plastic yielding…
Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter remain subject to debate: Glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine…
When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…
Super-cooled liquids are characterized by their fragility: the slowing down of the dynamics under cooling is more sudden and the jump of specific heat at the glass transition is generally larger in fragile liquids than in strong ones.…
Dynamic and structural heterogeneities play an important role in glass transition phenomena and in the formation of amorphous structures. Since structure and dynamics are mutually related, it is expected that there exists some relation…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
The origins of rapid dynamical slow down in glass forming liquids in the growth of static length scales, possibly associated with identifiable structural ordering, is a much debated issue. Growth of medium range crystalline order (MRCO) has…
Glasses and gels, widely encountered amorphous solids with diverse industrial and everyday applications, share intriguing similarities such as rigidity without crystalline order and dynamic slowing down during aging. However, the underlying…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…