Related papers: Complexity as the driving force for dynamical glas…

In many mean-field glassy systems, the low-temperature Gibbs measure is dominated by exponentially many metastable states. We analyze the evolution of the metastable states as temperature changes adiabatically in the solvable case of the…

A theoretical analysis [Angelani et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 065702 (2006)] predicts glassy behaviour of light in a nonlinear random medium. This implies slow dynamics related to the presence of many metastable states. We consider very…

There is a growing belief that the mode coupling theory is the proper microscopic theory for the dynamics of the undercooled liquid above a critical temperature T_c. In addition, there is some evidence that the system leaves the…

Dynamics near the surface of glasses is generally much faster than in the bulk. Neglecting static perturbations of structure at the surface, we use random first order transition theory to show the free energy barrier for activated motion…

We will review some of the theoretical progresses that have been recently done in the study of slow dynamics of glassy systems: the general techniques used for studying the dynamics in the mean field approximation and the emergence of a…

Direct atomically resolved observation of dynamics deep in the glassy regime has proved elusive for atomic and molecular glasses. Studies below the glass transition temperature Tg are especially rare due to long waiting times required to…

We investigate the liquid-glass phase transition in a system of point-like particles interacting via a finite-range attractive potential in D-dimensional space. The phase transition is driven by an `entropy crisis' where the available phase…

In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…

It is often stated that if one is presented with a snapshot of the positions of the molecules of a glass and one of a liquid, one is unable to tell the difference. Here we argue instead that given several such snapshots taken over a…

We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…

Transitions between metabasins in supercooled liquids seem to occur through rapid "democratic" collective particle rearrangements. Here we show that this apparent homogeneous particle motion is a direct consequence of dynamic facilitation.…

The field theory of a short range spin glass with Gaussian random interactions, is considered near the upper critical dimension six. In the glassy phase, replica symmetry breaking is accompanied with massless Goldstone modes, generated by…

The transition from a flowing to a static state in a granular material is studied using large-scale, 3D particle simulations. Similar to glasses, this transition is manifested in the development of a plateau in the contact normal force…

We compute for an archetypical glass-forming system the excess of particle mobility distributions over the corresponding distribution of dynamic propensity, a quantity that measures the tendency of the particles to be mobile and reflects…

We discuss dense states of QCD matter formed in high-energy hadronic and heavy-ion collisions from the point of view of statistical physics of non-equilibrium processes. For this sake, we first propose a formulation of the dynamical entropy…

In order to understand the long-standing problem of the nature of glass states, we performed intensive simulations on the thermodynamic properties and potential energy surface of an ideal glass. We found that the atoms of an ideal glass…

Numerical simulations on Ising Spin Glasses show that spin glass transitions do not obey the usual universality rules which hold at canonical second order transitions. On the other hand the dynamics at the approach to the transition appear…

We analyze the energy barriers that allow escapes from a given local minimum in a mean-field model of glasses. We perform this study by using the Kac-Rice method and computing the typical number of critical points of the energy function at…

Electron irradiation enables quantitative control over the plastic flow dynamics of silicate glasses, even far below the glass transition temperature. Through stress-relaxation experiments spanning ambient to near-glass-transition…

This theory combines a thermodynamic approach with a dynamic one in order to describe glass transition. Glass transition is regarded as an inaccessible second order phase transition, which is interrupted because of premature critical…