Related papers: Identifying the relevant parameters in design stra…

We study by Molecular Dynamics simulation a dense one-component system of particles confined on a spherical substrate. We more specifically investigate the evolution of the structural and dynamical properties of the system when changing the…

We study theoretically and numerically the microscopic cause of the mechanical stability of hard sphere glasses near their maximum packing. We show that, after coarse-graining over time, the hard sphere interaction can be described by an…

Understanding glasses is considered to be one of the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. A theoretical approach to unravel their universal properties is to consider the validity of equilibrium concepts such as temperature and…

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…

Recently, progress has been made in the understanding of anomalous vibrational excitations in amorphous solids. In the lowest-frequency region, the vibrational spectrum follows a non-Debye quartic law, which persists up to zero frequency…

Many of the large structures of the cell, such as the cytoskeleton, are assembled and maintained far from equilibrium. We study the stabilities of various structures for a simple model of such a far-from-equilibrium organized assembly in…

Slow dynamic nonlinearity is ubiquitous amongst brittle materials, such as rocks and concrete, with cracked microstructures. A defining feature of the behavior is the logarithmic-in-time recovery of stiffness after a mechanical…

Liquids relax extremely slowly upon approaching the glass state. One explanation is that an entropy crisis, due to the rarefaction of available states, makes it increasingly arduous to reach equilibrium in that regime. Validating this…

The microscopic mechanism by which amorphous solids yield plastically under an externally applied stress or deformation has remained elusive in spite of enormous research activity in recent years. Most approaches have attempted to identify…

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…

A fluid in a pore can form diverse heterogeneous structures. We combine a capillary description with the cubic-plus-association equation of state to study the thermodynamic stability of droplets, bubbles and films of water at 358 K in a…

The study of spin-glass dynamics, long considered the paradigmatic complex system, has reached important milestones. The availability of single crystals has allowed the experimental measurement of spin-glass coherence lengths of almost…

Topological constraint theory has become an increasingly popular tool to predict the compositional dependence of glass properties or pinpoint promising compositions with tailored functionalities. This approach reduces complex disordered…

This paper addresses the problem of determining the optimum shape for a beer glass that minimizes the heat transfer while the liquid is consumed, thereby keeping it cold for as long as possible. The proposed solution avoids the use of…

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 usefulness of glasses, and particularly of metallic glasses, in technological applications is often limited by their toughness, which is defined as the area under the stress vs. strain curve before plastic yielding. Recently toughness…

Thermodynamic multi-component solution solidification approach to liquid-to-glass transition is proposed and actual mechanisms underlying vitrification, other than viscous slowdown, are identified. Due to polydisperse aggregation in liquid…

We discuss the response of aging systems with short-range interactions to a class of random perturbations. Although these systems are out of equilibrium, the limit value of the free energy at long times is equal to the equilibrium free…

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…

In this paper we consider the problem of finding stable maxima of expensive (to evaluate) functions. We are motivated by the optimisation of physical and industrial processes where, for some input ranges, small and unavoidable variations in…