Related papers: Self generated randomness, defect wandering and vi…
We describe our perspective on the Structural Glass Transition (SGT) problem built on the premise that a viable theory must provide a consistent picture of the dynamics and statics, which are manifested by large increase in shear viscosity…
A Monte Carlo method is used in order to simulate the competition between the molecular relaxation and crystallization times in the formation of a glass. The results show that nucleation is avoided during supercooling and produce…
I describe a class of spin models with short--range plaquette interactions whose static equilibrium properties are trivial but which display glassy dynamics at low temperatures. These models have a dual description in terms of free defects…
When a liquid is cooled below its melting temperature, if crystallization is avoided, it forms a glass. This phenomenon, called glass transition, is characterized by a marked increase of viscosity, about 14 orders of magnitude, in a narrow…
We study numerically and analytically the coarsening of stripe phases in two spatial dimensions, and show that transient configurations do not achieve long ranged orientational order but rather evolve into glassy configurations with very…
The rigid to floppy transitions and the associated intermediate phase in glasses are studied in the case where the local structure is not fully determined from the macroscopic concentration. The approach uses size increasing cluster…
Aspects of the dynamical glass transition are considered within a mean field spin glass model. At the dynamical transition the the system condenses in a state of lower entropy. The difference, the information entropy or complexity, is…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
We investigate the formation of stripe patterns that appear on the surface of a dry granular system as the container is deformed very slowly. In an experimental study using nearly mono-disperse glass beads, we found that many faults develop…
Glassy materials yield under large external mechanical solicitations. Under oscillatory shear, yielding shows a well-known rheological fingerprint, common to samples with widely different microstructures. At the microscale, this corresponds…
We explore several potential issues that have been raised over the years regarding the "entropic droplet" scenario of activated transport in liquids, due to Wolynes and coworkers, with the aim of clarifying the status of various…
We review several models of glassy systems where the randomness is self generated, i.e. already an infinitesimal amount of disorder is sufficient to cause a transition to a non-ergodic, glassy state. We discuss the application of the…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
Dense non-Brownian suspension flows of hard particles display mystifying properties: as the jamming threshold is approached, the viscosity diverges, as well as a length scale that can be identified from velocity correlations. To unravel the…
We have investigated the interrelation between the spin glasses and the structural glasses. Spin glasses in this case are random magnets without reflection symmetry (e.g. $p$ - spin interaction spin glasses and Potts glasses) which contain…
Broken-symmetry-induced order parameters account for many phenomena in condensed matter physics. For spin glasses, such a framework dictates its theoretical construction, whereas experiments have only established dynamical behaviors such as…
The influence of periodic and random surface textures on the flow structure and effective slip length in Newtonian fluids is investigated by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We consider a situation where the typical pattern size is…
Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems aging under the crystallization threat. During ordinary glass formation, the atomic diffusion slows down rendering its experimental investigation impractically long, to the extent that a timescale…
The architecture of mechanical metamaterialsis designed to harness geometry, non-linearity and topology to obtain advanced functionalities such as shape morphing, programmability and one-way propagation. While a purely geometric framework…