Related papers: Entropy-vanishing transition and glassy dynamics i…
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…
We consider a simple spin system without disorder which exhibits a glassy regime. We show that this model can be well approximated by a system with quenched disorder which is studied with the standard methods developped in spin glasses. We…
In this talk I review some recent developments which shed light on the main connections between structural glasses and mean-field spin glass models with a discontinuous transition. I also discuss the role of quantum fluctuations on the…
We review a theoretical perspective of the dynamics of glass forming liquids and the glass transition. It is a perspective we have developed with our collaborators during this decade. It is based upon the structure of trajectory space. This…
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…
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…
In this letter we study a lattice gas system that undergoes a glassy transition. When we approach the glass transition we find both a divergence of a point to set correlation length and the vanishing of the thermodynamic potential. These…
It is often stated that if one is presented with a snapshot of the positions of the molecules of a glass and one of a liquid, one is unable to tell the difference. Here we argue instead that given several such snapshots taken over a…
We analyze the properties of the energy landscape of {\it finite-size} fully connected p-spin-like models whose high temperature phase is described, in the thermodynamic limit, by the schematic Mode Coupling Theory of super-cooled liquids.…
We consider the probability distribution for fluctuations in dynamical action and similar quantities related to dynamic heterogeneity. We argue that the so-called "glass transition" is a manifestation of low action tails in these…
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 use computer simulations to study the glass transition of dense fluids made of polydisperse, repulsive spheres. For hard particles, we vary the volume fraction, phi, and use compressible particles to explore finite temperatures, T>0. In…
Kinetically constrained models (KCMs) have been used to study and understand the origin of glassy dynamics. Despite having trivial thermodynamic properties, their dynamics slows down dramatically at low temperatures while displaying…
Slow dynamics in glassy systems is often interpreted as due to thermally activated events between "metastable" states. This emphasizes the role of nonperturbative fluctuations, which is especially dramatic when these fluctuations destroy a…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
We study the properties of the q-state frustrated bond percolation model by a Monte Carlo "bond flip" dynamics, using an algorithm originally devised by Sweeny and suitably modified to treat the presence of frustration. We analyze the…
This study introduces a modeling approach aimed at elucidating the pivotal role of symmetry in phase transitions, focusing specifically on the isotropic-nematic (I-N) transition characteristic of liquid crystal systems. By leveraging…
A theoretical analysis [Angelani et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 065702 (2006)] predicts glassy behaviour of light in a nonlinear random medium. This implies slow dynamics related to the presence of many metastable states. We consider very…
We study the role of different terms in the $N$-body potential of glass forming systems on the critical dynamics near the glass transition. Using a simplified spin model with quenched disorder, where the different terms of the real $N$-body…
We present evidence from computer simulations for glassy dynamics in suspensions of monodisperse hard ellipsoids. In equilibrium, almost spherical ellipsoids show a first order transition from an isotropic phase to a rotator phase. When…