Related papers: Bonding and the dynamics of glassy network liquids
Despite decades of research, it remains to be established whether the transformation of a liquid into a glass is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While observations of growing length scales are consistent with thermodynamic…
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…
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…
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…
We compute the temperature-dependent barrier for alpha-relaxations in several liquids, without adjustable parameters, using experimentally determined elastic, structural, and calorimetric data. We employ the random first order…
The fragility, that controls the temperature-dependent viscous properties of liquids as the glass transition is approached, in various glass-forming liquids with different atomic interactions and densities is investigated by molecular…
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…
Fragility is an empirical property that describes how abruptly a glass-forming material solidifies upon supercooling. The degree of fragility carries important implications for the functionality and processability of a material, as well as…
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.…
The rapid rise of viscosity or relaxation time upon supercooling is universal hallmark of glassy liquids. The temperature dependence of the viscosity, however, is quite non universal for glassy liquids and is characterized by the system's…
We explore several potential issues that have been raised over the years regarding the "entropic droplet" scenario of activated transport in liquids, due to Wolynes and coworkers, with the aim of clarifying the status of various…
Glass is a microscopically disordered, solid form of matter that results when a fluid is cooled or compressed in such a fashion that it does not crystallise. Almost all types of materials are capable of glass formation -- polymers, metal…
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…
Thermodynamics and kinetics are thought to be linked in glass transitions. The quantitative predictions of -relaxation activation barriers provided by the theory of glasses based on random first order transitions are compared with…
In this paper we revisit and extend the mapping between two apparently different classes of models. The first class contains the prototypical models described --at the mean-field level-- by the Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory of…
The temperature dependence of the non-ergodicity factor of vitreous GeO$_2$, $f_{q}(T)$, as deduced from elastic and quasi-elastic neutron scattering experiments, is analyzed. The data are collected in a wide range of temperatures from the…
In these notes we introduce briefly the fundamentals of the replica method in the context of liquid theory and the structural glass problem. In particular, we explain and show its usefulness as a computation framework in the context of the…
Sticky hard spheres, i.e., hard particles decorated with a short-ranged attractive interaction potential, constitute a relatively simple model with highly non-trivial glassy dynamics. The mode-coupling theory of the glass transition (MCT)…
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…
Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic…