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Thermodynamic multi-component solution solidification approach to liquid-to-glass transition is proposed and actual mechanisms underlying vitrification, other than viscous slowdown, are identified. Due to polydisperse aggregation in liquid…
Solid materials are commonly classified as crystalline or amorphous based on the presence or absence of long-range order.Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), like other solids,also display markedly different properties and functions in these…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
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…
We consider a system composed of a stack of weakly Josephson coupled superfluid layers with c-axis disorder in the form of random superfluid stiffnesses and vortex fugacities in each layer as well as random inter-layer coupling strengths.…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…
The process of homogeneous crystal nucleation has been considered in a model liquid, where the interparticle interaction is described by a short-range spherical oscillatory potential. Mechanisms of initiating structural ordering in the…
Molecular anisotropy plays an important role in the glass transition of a liquid. Recently, a novel bulk glass state has been discovered by optical microscopy experiments on suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids. 'Liquid glass' is a…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
Steady state dynamics of clustering, long range order, and inelastic collapse are experimentally observed in vertically shaken granular monolayers. At large vibration amplitudes, particle correlations show only short range order like…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Cohesion mechanism of cubic approximant crystals of newly discovered binary quasicrystals, Cd$_6$M (M=Yb and Ca), are studied theoretically. It is found that stabilization due to alloying is obtained if M is an element with low-lying…
We discuss the microscopic mechanisms by which low-temperature amorphous states, such as ultrastable glasses, transform into equilibrium fluids, after a sudden temperature increase. Experiments suggest that this process is similar to the…
Amorphous solids, such as glasses, have complex responses to deformations, with significant consequences in material design and applications. In this respect two intertwined aspects are important: stability and reversibility. It is crucial…
Formation and rupture of vesicles is a fundamental process underlying diverse phenomena in biology, materials science, and biomedical applications. Vesicles form when the area of a growing disk-like membrane exceeds a critical value at…
Randomly packing spheres of equal size into a container consistently results in a static configuration with a density of ~64%. The ubiquity of random close packing (RCP) rather than the optimal crystalline array at 74% begs the question of…
We review the Random First Order Transition Theory of the glass transition, emphasizing the experimental tests of the theory. Many distinct phenomena are quantitatively predicted or explained by the theory, both above and below the glass…
Solid-solid collapse transition in open framework structures is ubiquitous in nature. The real difficulty in understanding detailed microscopic aspects of such transitions in molecular systems arises from the interplay between different…
By molecular-dynamics simulations, we have studied the devitrification (or crystallization) of aged hard-sphere glasses. First, we find that the dynamics of the particles are intermittent: Quiescent periods, when the particles simply…