Related papers: Inherent Structures, Configurational Entropy and S…
In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or…
We review the behaviour of the Gibbs' and conditional entropies in deterministic and stochastic systems and continue to a formulation appropriate for a stochastically perturbed system with delayed dynamics. The underlying question driving…
We introduce and study a model which admits a complex landscape without containing quenched disorder. Continuing our previous investigation we introduce a disordered model which allows us to reconstruct all the main features of the original…
The configurational entropy is an indispensable tool to describe super-cooled liquids near the glass transition. Its calculation requires the enumeration of the basins in the potential energy landscape and when available, it reveals a…
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…
Computer simulations have been employed in recent years to evaluate the configurational entropy changes in model glass-forming liquids. We consider two methods, both of which involve the calculation of the `intra-basin' entropy as a means…
We carefully investigate the two fundamental assumptions in the Stillinger-Weber analysis of the inherent structures (IS's) in the energy landscape and come to conclude that they cannot be validated. This explains some of the conflicting…
We analyze the properties of a Lennard-Jones system at the level of the potential energy landscape. After an exhaustive investigation of the topological features of the landscape of the systems, obtained studying small size sample, we…
We compute for an archetypical glass-forming system the excess of particle mobility distributions over the corresponding distribution of dynamic propensity, a quantity that measures the tendency of the particles to be mobile and reflects…
Finding proper collective variables for complex systems and processes is one of the most challenging tasks in simulations, which limits the interpretation of experimental and simulated data and the application of enhanced sampling…
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…
Truly stable metastable states are an artifact of the mean-field approximation or the zero temperature limit. If such appealing concepts in glass theory as configurational entropy are to have a meaning beyond these approximations, one needs…
We study three kinetic models with constraint, namely the Symmetrically Constrained Ising Chain, the Asymmetrically Constrained Ising Chain, and the Backgammon Model. All these models show glassy behavior and coarsening. We apply to them…
These lecture notes can be read in two ways. The first two Sections contain a review of the phenomenology of several physical systems with slow nonequilibrium dynamics. In the Conclusions we summarize the scenario derived from the solution…
Glassy systems are disordered systems characterized by extremely slow dynamics. Examples are supercooled liquids, whose dynamics slow down under cooling. The specific pattern of slowing-down depends on the material considered. This…
We observe numerically the properties of the infinite-temperature inherent structures of m-component vector spin glasses in three dimensions. An increase of m implies a decrease of the amount of minima of the free energy, down to the…
The number of distinguishable inherent structures of a liquid is the key component to understanding the thermodynamics of glass formers. In the case of hard potential systems such as hard discs, spheres and ellipsoids, an inherent structure…
Spin-glass systems are universal models for representing many-body phenomena in statistical physics and computer science. High quality solutions of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be encoded into low energy states of…
Durable interest in developing a framework for the detailed structure of glassy materials has produced numerous structural descriptors that trade off between general applicability and interpretability. However, none approach the combination…
In these two lectures I review our theoretical understanding of spin glasses paying a particular attention to the basic physical ideas. We introduce the replica method and we describe its probabilistic consequences (we stress the recently…