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We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
This paper proposes strategies for designing a system whose computational model is subject to aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. Aleatory variables, which are caused by randomness in physical parameters, are draws from a possibly unknown…
The dynamical behavior of a kind of models with hierarchically constrained dynamics is investigated. The models exhibit many properties resembling real structural glasses. In particular, we focus on the study of time-dependent temperature…
Glassy behavior is one of the main open problems in condensed matter physics. In this thesis, we approach the problem by studying spin-glasses and colloids, using several complementary strategies. From the point of view of model building,…
We propose a theory based on simple physical arguments that describes a non equilibrium steady-state by a temperature-like parameter (an "effective temperature"). We show how one can predict the effective temperature as a function of the…
The art of making structural, polymeric and metallic glasses is rapidly developing with many applications. A limitation to their use is their mechanical stability: under increasing external strain all amorphous solids respond elastically to…
The term "fragility" describes the rate at which viscosity grows when a supercooled liquid approaches its putative glass transition temperature. The field of glassy materials is actively searching for a structural origin that governs this…
Many properties of solids such as the glass state are commonly treated as nonequilibrium phenomena, which involve many conceptual difficulties. However, few studies have addressed the problem of understanding equilibrium itself. Equilibrium…
This thesis sums up the research work I performed as a PhD student in Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, and \'Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure, Paris, under the joint supervision of Prof. Giorgio Parisi and Dr. Francesco Zamponi. The thesis focuses…
The study of the properties of glass-forming liquids is difficult for many reasons. Analytic solutions of mean field models are usually available only for systems embedded in a space with an unphysically high number of spatial dimensions;…
The anharmonic soft modes studied in recent numerical work in the glass phase of simple liquids have an unstable core, stabilized by the positive restoring forces of the surrounding elastic medium. The present paper formulates an unstable…
An analysis of the dynamics is performed, of exactly solvable models for fragile and strong glasses, exploiting the partitioning of the free energy landscape in inherent structures. The results are compared with the exact solution of the…
A novel form of amorphous matter characterized by marginal stability was recently discovered in the mean-field theory of structural glasses. Using this approach, we provide complete phase diagrams delimiting the location of the marginally…
Whether or not there is growing static order accompanying the dynamical heterogeneity and increasing relaxation times seen in glassy systems is a matter of dispute. An obstacle to resolving this issue is that the order is expected to be…
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…
We compare dynamical heterogeneities in equilibrated supercooled liquids and in the nonequilibrium glassy state within the framework of the random first order transition theory. Fluctuating mobility generation and transport in the glass are…
Diffusivity, a measure for how rapidly a fluid self-mixes, shows an intimate, but seemingly fragmented, connection to thermodynamics. On one hand, the "configurational" contribution to entropy (related to the number of mechanically-stable…
Strongly correlated amorphous solids are a class of glass-formers whose inter-particle potential admits an approximate inverse power-law form in a relevant range of inter-particle distances. We study the steady-state plastic flow of such…
By means of a systematic expansion around the infinite-dimensional solution, we obtain an approximation scheme to compute properties of glasses in low dimensions. The resulting equations take as input the thermodynamic and structural…
Dynamical systems describe the changes in processes that arise naturally from their underlying physical principles, such as the laws of motion or the conservation of mass, energy or momentum. These models facilitate a causal explanation for…