Related papers: Statistical Physics of Structural Glasses
The third law of thermodynamics dictates that the entropy of materials becomes zero as temperature ($T$) approaches zero. Contrarily, glass and other similar materials exhibit nonzero entropy at $T=0$, which contradicts the third law. For…
We use the replica method to study the ideal glass transition of a liquid of identical Hard Spheres. We obtain estimates of the configurational entropy in the liquid phase, of the Kauzmann packing fraction, in the range 0.58--0.62, and of…
We discuss the microscopic mechanisms by which low-temperature amorphous states, such as ultrastable glasses, transform into equilibrium fluids, after a sudden temperature increase. Experiments suggest that this process is similar to the…
In these lectures I will review the approach to glasses based on the replica formalism. Many of the physical ideas are very similar to those of older approaches. The replica approach has the advantage of describing in an unified setting…
We applied an efficient methodology to separate vibrational and configurational entropies in bulk metallic glasses by means of molecular dynamics simulation based on a combination of non-equilibrium adiabatic switching and reversible…
To investigate the consequences of component confinement such as at a glass transition and the well-known energy or enthalpy gap (between the glass and the perfect crystal at absolute zero, see text), we follow our previous approach [Phys.…
We analyse numerically thermal fluctuations of the static overlap between equilibrium configurations in a glass-forming liquid approaching the glass transition. We find that the emergence of slow dynamics near the onset temperature…
The metastable states of a glass are counted by adding a weak pinning field which explicitly breaks the ergodicity. Their entropy, that is the logarithm of their number, is extensive in a range of temperatures $T_G < T < T_C$ only, where…
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…
We study the simplest possible model of nanocrystal consisting in a simple cubic lattice with a small number of atoms (NA ~ 10-10^3), where each atom is linked to its nearest neighbor by a quantum harmonic potential. Some properties…
Strong changes in bulk properties, such as modulus and viscosity, are observed near the glass transition temperature, T_{g}, of amorphous materials. For more than a century, intense efforts have been made to define a microscopic origin for…
A key open question in the glass transition field is whether a finite temperature thermodynamic transition to the glass state exists or not. Recent simulations of coupled replicas in atomistic models have found signatures of a static…
A molecular theory of the glass transition of network forming liquids is developed using a combination of self-consistent phonon and liquid state approaches. Both the dynamical transition and the entropy crisis characteristic of random…
Tackling the low-temperature fate of supercooled liquids is challenging due to the immense timescales involved, which prevent equilibration and lead to the operational glass transition. Relating glassy behaviour to an underlying,…
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…
In the context of a classical example of glass-formation in 3-dimensions we exemplify how to construct a statistical mechanical theory of the glass transition. At the heart of the approach is a simple criterion for verifying a proper choice…
We use computer simulations to investigate the static properties of a simple glass-forming fluid in which the positions of a finite fraction of the particles has been frozen in. By probing the equilibrium distribution of the overlap between…
We report on a refined version of our spin-glass type approach to the low-temperature physics of structural glasses. Its key idea is based on a Born von Karman expansion of the interaction potential about a set of reference positions in…
We use real replicas to investigate stability of thermodynamic homogeneity of the free energy of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model of spin glasses. Within the replica trick with the replica symmetric ansatz we show that the averaged…
We study via RG, numerics, exact bounds and qualitative arguments the equilibrium Gibbs measure of a particle in a $d$-dimensional gaussian random potential with {\it translationally invariant logarithmic} spatial correlations. We show that…