Related papers: The disordered Backgammon model
We investigate aging in glassy systems based on a simple model, where a point in configuration space performs thermally activated jumps between the minima of a random energy landscape. The model allows us to show explicitly a subaging…
In this work we consider a problem related to the equilibrium statistical mechanics of spin glasses, namely the study of the Gibbs measure of the random energy model. For solving this problem, new results of independent interest on sums of…
The linear response to temperature changes is derived for systems with overdamped stochastic dynamics. Holding both in transient and steady state conditions, the results allow to compute nonequilibrium thermal susceptibilities from…
At low temperatures the dynamical degrees of freedom in amorphous solids are tunnelling two-level systems (TLSs). Concentrating on these degrees of freedom, and taking into account disorder and TLS-TLS interactions, we obtain a "TLS-glass",…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
The nonexponential relaxation ocurring in complex dynamics manifested in a wide variety of systems is analyzed through a simple model of diffusion in phase space. It is found that the inability of the system to find its equilibrium state in…
We present a thermodynamic theory of the Kovacs effect based on the idea that the configurational degrees of freedom of a glass-forming material are driven out of equilibrium with the heat bath by irreversible thermal contraction and…
The standard model of glasses is an ensemble of two-level systems interacting with a thermal bath. The general origin of memory effects in this model is a quasi-stationary but non-equilibrium state of a single two-level system, which is…
Ordering at arbitrarily high temperature - entropic order - has been argued to take place in a class of generalized Ising models parameterised by a real interaction parameter $p$ when $p\ge 1$. We give a rigorous proof of this conjecture.…
An integrable nonlinear model for the time-dependent equilibration of a bosonic system that has been devised earlier is solved exactly with boundary conditions that are appropriate for a truncated Bose-Einstein distribution, and include the…
We study various models of independent particles hopping between energy `traps' with a density of energy barriers $\rho(E)$, on a $d$ dimensional lattice or on a fully connected lattice. If $\rho(E)$ decays exponentially, a true dynamical…
We present a mean-field theory of a coarse-grained model of a super-cooled liquid in which relaxation occurs via local plastic rearrangements. Local relaxation can be induced by thermal fluctuations or by the long-range elastic consequences…
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 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 in this article the long-time behaviour of the solutions to the energy-dependant, spatially-homogeneous, inelastic Boltzmann equation for hard spheres. This model describes a diluted gas composed of hard spheres under…
Glass-forming liquids have only a modest tendency to crystallize and hence their dynamics can be studied even below the melting temperature. The relaxation dynamics of most of these liquids shows at a temperature $T_c$, somewhat above the…
We pursue our investigation of the non-equilibrium dynamics of the Backgammon model, a dynamical urn model which exhibits aging and glassy behavior at low temperature. We present an analytical study of the scaling behavior of the local…
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…
Liquids relax extremely slowly upon approaching the glass state. One explanation is that an entropy crisis, due to the rarefaction of available states, makes it increasingly arduous to reach equilibrium in that regime. Validating this…
We study the low temperature dynamics of a two dimensional short-range spin system with uniform ferromagnetic interactions, which displays glassiness at low temperatures despite the absence of disorder or frustration. The model has a dual…