Related papers: Rigidity and intermediate phases in glasses driven…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
We consider the adiabatic evolution of glassy states under external perturbations. Although the formalism we use is very general, we focus here on infinite-dimensional hard spheres where an exact analysis is possible. We consider…
Driven granular systems readily form glassy phases at high particle volume fractions and low driving amplitudes. We use computer simulations of a driven granular glass to evidence a re-entrance melting transition into a fluid state, which,…
A theoretical model is presented, describing the glassy freezing of electrons in the vicinity of disorder driven metal-insulator transitions. Our results indicate that the onset of glassy dynamics should emerge before the localization…
We propose a new class of phenomenological models for dynamic glass transitions. The system consists of an ensemble of mesoscopic regions to which local energies are allocated. At each time step, a region is randomly chosen and a new local…
We review several models of glassy systems where the randomness is self generated, i.e. already an infinitesimal amount of disorder is sufficient to cause a transition to a non-ergodic, glassy state. We discuss the application of the…
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 present a simple mathematical framework for the description of the dynamics of glassy systems in terms of a random walk in a complex energy landscape pictured as a network of minima. We show how to use the tools developed for the study…
We study the dynamics of a glassy model with infinite range interactions externally driven by an oscillatory force. We find a well-defined transition in the (Temperature-Amplitude-Frequency) phase diagram between (i) a `glassy' state…
By means of the isoconfigurational method we calculate the change in the propensity for motion that the structure of a glass-forming system experiences during its relaxation dynamics. The relaxation of such a system has been demonstrated to…
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…
Amorphous glassy materials of diverse nature -- concentrated emulsions, granular materials, pastes, molecular glasses -- display complex flow properties, intermediate between solid and liquid, which are at the root of their use in many…
We show in numerical simulations that a system of two coupled replicas of a binary mixture of hard spheres undergoes a phase transition in equilibrium at a density slightly smaller than the glass transition density for an unreplicated…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
The replica theory of glasses predicts that in the infinite dimensional mean field limit there exist two distinct glassy phases of matter: stable glass and marginal glass. We have developed a technique to experimentally probe these phases…
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…
We use a random pinning procedure to investigate stable glassy states associated with large deviations of the activity in a model glass-former. We pin particles both from active (equilibrium) configurations and from stable (inactive) glassy…
The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…
We introduce a system of bacteria confined to a finite 2D oil-water interface and driven on two distinct time scales by motility and by growth. The combined effect of activity on different time scales creates transitions between several…
We study bidisperse colloidal suspensions confined within glass microcapillary tubes to model the glass transition in confined cylindrical geometries. We use high speed three-dimensional confocal microscopy to observe particle motions for a…