Related papers: Rigidity and intermediate phases in glasses driven…
The transition of a fluid to a rigid glass upon cooling is a common route of transformation from liquid to solid that embodies the most poorly understood features of both phases1,2,3. From the liquid perspective, the puzzle is to understand…
The aim of this paper is to summarise the basic arguments and the intuition bolstering the RFOT picture for glasses, based on a finite dimensional extension of mean-field models with an exponentially large number of metastable states. We…
The physical properties of blends of distinct homopolymers, cross-linked beyond the gelation point, are addressed via a Landau approach involving a pair of coupled order-parameter fields: one describing vulcanisation, the other describing…
Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
We study the phase diagram of glassy systems in presence of an attractive coupling among real replicas. We find competition among a localized and a delocalized phase, that are separated by a coexistence line as in ordinary first order phase…
We show the existence of fragile-to-strong transitions in kinetically constrained systems by studying the equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a generic constrained Ising spin chain which interpolates between the symmetric and…
We review a statistical picture of the glassy state derived from the analysis of the off-equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relations. We define an ultra-long time limit where ``one time quantities'' are close to equilibrium while response…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
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…
The role of porous structure and glass density in response to compressive deformation of amorphous materials is investigated via molecular dynamics simulations. The disordered, porous structures were prepared by quenching a high-temperature…
Complex behavior in glassforming liquids is associated with formation of a mosaic of different structures. Using bond order parameters together with topological characteristics of the bond network, we show that in the mosaic of crystalline…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
Cooperative events requiring anomalously large fluctuations are a defining characteristic for the onset of glassy relaxation across many materials. The importance of such intermittent events has been noted in systems as diverse as…
The Random First Order Transition (RFOT) theory of glasses provides a unified framework for explaining the observed correlations of the kinetic and thermodynamic behaviors of glass-forming liquids having a wide variety of chemical…
Using video microscopy, we measure local spatial constraints in disordered binary colloidal samples, ranging from dilute fluids to jammed glasses, and probe their spatial and temporal correlations to local dynamics during the glass…
We image local structural rearrangements in soft colloidal glasses under small periodic perturbations induced by thermal cycling. Local structural entropy $S_{2}$ positively correlates with observed rearrangements in colloidal glasses. The…
A molecular theory of the glass transition of network forming liquids is developed using a combination of self-consistent phonon and liquid state approaches. Both the dynamical transition and the entropy crisis characteristic of random…
We consider a microscopic model of a polymer blend that is prone to phase separation. Permanent crosslinks are introduced between randomly chosen pairs of monomers, drawn from the Deam-Edwards distribution. Thereby, not only density but…
Marginally stable solids have peculiar physical properties that were discovered and analyzed in the context of the jamming transition. We theoretically investigate the existence of marginal stability in a prototypical model for structural…