Related papers: Activated events in glasses: the structure of entr…
We consider the problem of slow activation dynamics in glassy systems undergoing a random first order phase transition. Using an effective potential approach to supercooled liquids, we determine the spectrum of activation barriers for…
Glass-forming liquids exhibit a dramatic dynamical slowdown as the temperature is lowered. This can be attributed to relaxation proceeding via large structural rearrangements whose characteristic size increases as the system cools. These…
The barriers between metastable states near the glass transition of a random heteropolymer are studied using replicas by describing inhomogeneous states. The instanton solution for a replica space free energy functional is found numerically…
The critical behaviour of the dynamical transition of glassy system is controlled by a Replica Symmetric action with n=1 replicas. The most divergent diagrams in the loop expansion correspond at all orders to the solutions of a stochastic…
We consider the effect of droplet excitations in the random first order transition theory of glasses on the configurational entropy. The contribution of these excitations is estimated both at and above the ideal glass transition…
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 present a study of two model liquids with different interaction potentials, exhibiting similar structure but significantly different dynamics at low temperatures. By evaluating the configurational entropy, we show that the differences in…
In simplified models of glasses we clarify the existence of two different kinds of activated dynamics, which coexist, with one of the two dominating over the other. One is the energy barrier hopping that is typically used to picture…
We study the role of elasticity-induced facilitation on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids by a coarse-grained two-dimensional model in which local relaxation events, taking place by thermal activation, can trigger new relaxations by…
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…
This paper gives an introduction and brief overview of some of our recent work on the equilibrium thermodynamics of glasses. We have focused onto first principle computations in simple fragile glasses, starting from the two body interatomic…
We review the phenomena of dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming systems and its description within replica and mean-field theories of the glass transition.
We study theoretically and numerically a family of multi-point dynamic susceptibilities that quantify the strength and characteristic lengthscales of dynamic heterogeneities in glass-forming materials. We use general theoretical arguments…
By numerical simulations of the $3d$ Ising spin glass we find evidence that spontaneous replica symmetry breaking theory and not the droplet model describes with good accuracy the equilibrium behavior of the system.
We develop a replicated liquid theory for structural glasses which exhibit spatial variation of physical quantities along one axis, say $z$-axis. The theory becomes exact with infinite transverse dimension $d-1 \to \infty$. It provides an…
By defining a spatially varying replica overlap parameter for a supercooled liquid referenced to an ensemble of fiducial liquid state configurations we explicitly construct a constrained replica free energy functional that maps directly…
We discuss a theoretical approach to structural glasses as they happen in real situations. Older ideas based on `configurational entropy', on `fictive temperatures' and on Edwards' `compactivity' are sharpened and unified in an out of…
We use computer simulations to probe the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of a glass-former that undergoes an ideal glass-transition because of the presence of randomly pinned particles. We find that even deep in the equilibrium glass…
Dynamics is central to living systems. In the last two decades, experiments have revealed that the dynamics in diverse biological systems - from intracellular cytoplasm to cellular and organismal aggregates - are remarkably similar to that…
We study thermally activated dynamics using functional renormalization within the field theory of randomly pinned elastic systems, a prototype for glasses. It appears through an essentially non-perturbative boundary layer in the running…