Related papers: Structural transitions and nonmonotonic relaxation…
The viscosity of glass-forming liquids increases by many orders of magnitude if their temperature is lowered by a mere factor of 2-3 [1,2]. Recent studies suggest that this widespread phenomenon is accompanied by spatially heterogeneous…
Super-cooled liquids are characterized by their fragility: the slowing down of the dynamics under cooling is more sudden and the jump of specific heat at the glass transition is generally larger in fragile liquids than in strong ones.…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
The mode-coupling theory of the glass transition treats the dynamics of supercooled liquids in terms of two-point density correlation functions. Here we consider a generalized, hierarchical formulation of schematic mode-coupling equations…
Electron transport through amorphous monatomic metallic structures generated earlier by molecular dynamics simulations is studied numerically. The interference of electronic trajectories backscattered by the structural disorder probes the…
We study the solid-to-liquid transition in a two-dimensional fully periodic soft-glassy model with an imposed spatially heterogeneous stress. The model we consider consists of droplets of a dispersed phase jammed together in a continuous…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
We report a study on the static and dynamic properties of several liquid 5$d$ transition metals at thermodynamic conditions near their respective melting points. This is performed by resorting to ab initio molecular dynamics simulations in…
We investigate the dynamics of elastic microstructures within a fluid that are subjected to thermal fluctuations. We perform analysis to obtain systematically simplified descriptions of the mechanics in the limiting regimes when (i) the…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
A percolation model is proposed to explain the structural phase transitions found in Li$_{1-x}$H$_x$IO$_3$ mixed crystals as a function of the concentration parameter $x$. The percolation thresholds are obtained from Monte Carlo simulations…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
The random first-order transition (RFOT) theory of the structural glass transition is reviewed in a pedagogical fashion. The rigidity that emerges in crystals and glassy liquids is of the same fundamental origin. In both cases, it…
We report an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation study of several static and dynamic properties of the liquid 3d transition metals. The calculated static structure factors show qualitative agreement with the available experimental data,…
We study the evolution of structural disorder under cooling in supercooled liquids, focusing on covalent networks. We introduce a model for the energy of networks that incorporates weak non-covalent interactions. We show that at…
Previous studies of the structure of liquid water under pressure performed by neutron diffraction, allowed us to establish two structural limits in liquid water. These two limits are closely connected to the two known forms of amorphous ice…
The complex behavior of confined fluids arising due to a competition between layering and local packing can be disentangled by considering quasi-confined liquids, where periodic boundary conditions along the confining direction restore…
The relation between liquid-liquid phase transitions and waterlike density anomalies in core-softened potentials of fluids was investigated in an exactly solvable one dimensional lattice model and a in a three dimensional fluid with…