Related papers: Enthalpy recovery in semicrystalline polymers
We investigate the liquid-glass phase transition in a system of point-like particles interacting via a finite-range attractive potential in D-dimensional space. The phase transition is driven by an `entropy crisis' where the available phase…
We introduce an extension of the lattice model of melting of semiflexible polymers originally proposed by Flory. Along with a bending penalty, present in the original model and involving three sites of the lattice, we introduce an…
The thermalization process is studied in an expanding parton gas using the Boltzmann equation with two types of collision terms. In the relaxation time approximation we determine the criteria under which a time-dependent relaxation time…
The principal theme of this paper is that anomalously slow, super-Arrhenius relaxations in glassy materials may be activated processes involving chains of molecular displacements. As pointed out in a preceding paper with A. Lemaitre, the…
Glasses encode the memory of any thermo-mechanical treatment applied to them. This ability is associated to the existence of a myriad of metastable amorphous states which can be probed through different experimental pathways. It is usually…
Using the potential energy landscape formalism we show that, in the temperature range in which the dynamics of a glass forming system is thermally activated, there exists a unique set of "basis glass states" each of which is confined to a…
The description of activated relaxation of glassy systems in the multidimensional configurational space is a long-standing open problem. We develop a phenomenological description of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a model with a rough…
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…
The dynamics of many glassy systems are known to exhibit string-like hopping motions each consisting of a line of particles displacing one and other. By using molecular dynamics simulations of glassy polymers, we show that these motions…
We investigate the dynamical response of glass-forming systems composed of topologically constrained ring polymers subjected to an instantaneous thermal quench, employing large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We demonstrate that the…
The configurational entropy is one of the most important thermodynamic quantities characterizing supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition. Despite decades of experimental, theoretical, and computational investigation, a widely…
We use the general statement of the second law applied to an isolated system, the glass in an extremely large medium, to prove that the entropy of the glass must decrease with time during its relaxation towards the supercooled liquid state.…
We review the approach to glasses based on the replica formalism. The replica approach presented here is a first principle's approach which aims at deriving the main glass properties from the microscopic Hamiltonian. In contrast to the old…
In enzymatic recycling or biodegradation of semi-crystalline plastic waste, crystalline spherulites embedded into an amorphous matrix hinder and slow down depolymerisation. When the enzymatic depolymerisation temperature exceeds the glass…
The selection of an equilibrium state by maximising the entropy of a system, subject to certain constraints, is often powerfully motivated as an exercise in logical inference, a procedure where conclusions are reached on the basis of…
Upon cooling, glass-forming liquids experience a two-step relaxation associated to the cage rattling and the escape from the cage, and the following decoupling between the \b{eta}- and the {\alpha}-relaxations. The found decoupling…
The barriers between metastable states near the glass transition of a random heteropolymer are studied using replicas by describing inhomogeneous states. The instanton solution for a replica space free energy functional is found numerically…
We present a non-isothermal mesoscopic model for investigation of the phase transition dynamics of thermoresponsive polymers. Since this model conserves energy in the simulations, it is able to correctly capture not only the transient…
The number of compact structures of a single condensed polymer (SCP), with similar free energies, grows exponentially with the degree of polymerization. In analogy with structural glasses (SGs), we expect that at low temperatures chain…
We describe a model for the thermodynamics and dynamics of glass-forming liquids in terms of excitations from an ideal glass state to a Gaussian manifold of configurationally excited states. The quantitative fit of this three parameter…