Related papers: Nature of vibrational eigenmodes in topologically …

The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all…

Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…

The emergence of nanoscience has increased the importance of experiments able to probe the very local structure of materials, especially for disordered and heterogeneous systems. This is technologically important; for example, the nanoscale…

Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…

There have been some interesting recent advances in understanding the notion of mechanical disorder in structural glasses and the statistical mechanics of these systems' low-energy excitations. Here we contribute to these advances by…

Using molecular dynamics calculations and the Voronoi tessellation, we study the evolution of the local structure of a soft-sphere glass versus temperature starting from the liquid phase at different quenching rates. This study is done for…

In equilibrium, disorder conspires with topological defects to redefine the ordered states of matter in systems as diverse as crystals, superconductors and liquid crystals. Far from equilibrium, however, the consequences of quenched…

The nucleation of cavities in a homogenous polymer under tensile strain is investigated in a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation. In order to establish a causal relation between local microstructure and the onset of cavitation, a…

The vibrational spectra of glass formers follow different laws with respect to crystals. A rationale for their anomalous behaviour is provided by the euclidean random matrix theory. Experiments on glass formers at different densities might…

We analyze low-frequency vibrational modes in a two-dimensional, zero-temperature, quasistatically sheared model glass to identify a population of structural "soft spots" where particle rearrangements are initiated. The population of spots…

Elucidating the nature of the glass transition has been the holy grail of condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics for several decades. A phenomenological aspect that makes glass formation a conceptually formidable problem is that…

We study the dynamics of synthetic molecules whose architectures are generated by space transformations from a point group acting on seed resonators. We show that the dynamical matrix of any such molecule can be reproduced as the left…

In an attempt to quantitatively characterize the recently observed slow dynamics in the isotropic and nematic phase of liquid crystals, we investigate the single-particle orientational dynamics of rodlike molecules across the…

Using molecular dynamics simulations we study the slow dynamics of a hard sphere fluid confined in a disordered porous matrix. The presence of both discontinuous and continuous glass transitions as well as the complex interplay between…

While the structural dynamics of chromophores are of interest for a range of applications, it is experimentally very challenging to resolve the underlying microscopic mechanisms. Glassy dynamics are also challenging for atomistic…

We report a molecular dynamics (MD) study of the collective dynamics of a simple monatomic liquid -interacting through a two body potential that mimics that of lithium- across the liquid-glass transition. In the glassy phase we find…

The notion of topology in physical systems is associated with the existence of a nonlocal ordering that is insensitive to a large class of perturbations. This brings robustness to the behaviour of the system and can serve as a ground for…

We examine here various aspects of the statics and dynamics of disordered elastic systems such as manifolds and periodic systems. Although these objects look very similar and indeed share some underlying physics, periodic systems constitute…

We investigate the possibility of using structural disorder to induce a topological phase in a solid state system. Using first-principles calculations, we introduce structural disorder in the trivial insulator BiTeI and observe the…

In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…