Related papers: Heterogeneous Dynamics, Marginal Stability and Sof…

Measuring, characterizing and modelling the slow dynamics of glassy soft matter is a great challenge, with an impact that ranges from industrial applications to fundamental issues in modern statistical physics, such as the glass transition…

In this paper we consider different models for soft modes in jammed hard spheres. We show how one can construct mean field models that can be solved analytically. The analytic solution of these models displays an excess of low energy soft…

While the glass transition at non-zero temperature seems to be hard to access for experimental, theoretical, or simulation studies, jamming at zero temperature has been explored in great detail. It is a widely discussed question whether…

We numerically analyse the landscape governing the evolution of the vibrational dynamics of hard disk glasses as the density increases towards jamming. We find that the dynamics becomes slow, spatially correlated, and starts to display…

A recent hypothesis claims that the glass transition itself, though it is a very pronounced relaxation peak, is no separate relaxation process at all, but is just the breakdown of the shear modulus due to the weak elastic dipole interaction…

We derive a microscopic criterion for the stability of hard sphere configurations, and we show empirically that this criterion is marginally satisfied in the glass. This observation supports a geometric interpretation for the initial rapid…

The effect of confinement in the segmental relaxation of polymers is considered. On the basis of a thermodynamic model we discuss the emerging relevance of the fast degrees of freedom in stimulating the much slower segmental relaxation, as…

Glass forming liquids exhibit a rich phenomenology upon confinement. This is often related to the effects arising from wall-fluid interactions. Here we focus on the interesting limit where the separation of the confining walls becomes of…

We study a chain of identical glassy systems in a constrained equilibrium where each bond of the chain is forced to remain at a preassigned distance to the previous one. We apply this description to Mean Field Glassy systems in the limit of…

Time scales associated with activated transitions between glassy metastable states of a free energy functional appropriate for a dense hard sphere system are calculated by using a new Monte Carlo method for the local density variables. We…

When a liquid freezes, a change in the local atomic structure marks the transition to the crystal. When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, however, no noticeable structural change marks the glass transition. Indeed, characteristic features…

Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among…

We study the relation between short-time vibrational modes and long-time relaxational dynamics in a kinetically constrained lattice gas with harmonic interactions between neighbouring particles. We find a correlation between the location of…

One of the general mechanisms that give rise to the slow cooperative relaxation characteristic of classical glasses is the presence of kinetic constraints in the dynamics. Here we show that dynamical constraints can similarly lead to slow…

A theory for the microscopic structure and the vibrational properties of soft sphere glass at finite temperature is presented. With an effective potential, derived here, the phase diagram and vibrational properties are worked out around the…

We propose damage spreading (DS) as a tool to investigate the topological features related to the ruggedness of the free energy landscape. We argue that DS measures the positiveness of the largest Lyapunov exponent associated to the basins…

From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…

Structural relaxation in hard-sphere colloidal glasses has been studied using confocal microscopy. The motion of individual particles is followed over long time scales to detect the rearranging regions in the system. We have used normal…

The evolution of porous structure and mechanical properties of binary glasses under tensile loading were examined using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider vitreous systems obtained in the process of phase separation after a rapid…

The shear response of soft solids can be modeled with linear elasticity, provided the forcing is slow and weak. Both of these approximations must break down when the material loses rigidity, such as in foams and emulsions at their…