Related papers: Glass transition and effective potential in the hy…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
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…
Based on experimental evidences we present a phenomenological description of the thermal glass transition as a dynamical phase transition. Different susceptibilities calculated on the basis of this description are in good qualitative…
We obtain analytic expressions for the time correlation functions of a liquid of spherical particles, exact in the limit of high dimensions $d$. The derivation is long but straightforward: a dynamic virial expansion for which only the first…
In two recent interesting letters evidence was presented for the existence of a growing dynamic correlation length when we approach the glass transition from the liquid phase (a similar divergence is present also in the off-equilibrium…
We present a modified version of our "sliding model", where chain arcs, between two contacts at the surface, may move if all the barriers along the arc are weaker than a certain threshold.An important advance of the revised model is that…
The glass transition refers to the non-equilibrium process by which an equilibrium liquid is transformed to a non-equilibrium disordered solid, or vice versa. Associated response functions, such as heat capacities, are markedly different on…
The exact mean-field theory for the simplest glass-forming system - the dense assembly of hard spheres in the large dimensional limit - predicts the existence of a Gardner phase. This transition is characterized by full replica symmetry…
The dynamics of a glass transition is discussed in terms of the motion of a particle in a one dimensional correlated random potential. An exact calculation of the velocity $V$ under an applied force $f$ demonstrates a variety of dynamic…
We provide an overview of the different types of computational techniques developed over the years to study supercooled liquids, glassy materials and the physics of the glass transition. We organise these numerical strategies into four…
In ref. cond-mat/0005372, Sastry studies by numerical simulations the phase diagram of a simple fragile glass-forming liquid, presenting very interesting and clear results. We apply to this system, at various density values, the analytic…
Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic…
We consider a fluid of hard spheres bearing one or two uniform circular adhesive patches, distributed so as not to overlap. Two spheres interact via a ``sticky'' Baxter potential if the line joining the centers of the two spheres intersects…
We develop a quantum replica method for interacting particle systems and use it to estimate the location of the glass transition line in Helium 4. Although we do not fully succeed in taking into account all quantum effects, we make a…
This Ph.D. thesis is divided in two parts. The first one concerns the equilibrium properties of glassy systems. Some aspects of the phenomenology of glasses and of theories attempting to describe them are reviewed in chapter 1. A study of…
Using a distinguishable-particle lattice model based on void-induced dynamics, we successfully reproduce the well-known linear relation between heat capacity and temperature at very low temperatures. The heat capacity is dominated by…
We show that a glass transition, signaled by a peak in the specific heat vs. temperature, can occur because a glassy system that shows no signs of aging progresses so slowly through the energy landscape that the time needed to obtain an…
We generalize the simplest kinetically constrained model of a glass-forming liquid by softening kinetic constraints, allowing them to be violated with a small finite rate. We demonstrate that this model supports a first-order dynamical…
Tackling the low-temperature fate of supercooled liquids is challenging due to the immense timescales involved, which prevent equilibration and lead to the operational glass transition. Relating glassy behaviour to an underlying,…
We introduce an approach to derive an effective scalar field theory for the glass transition; the fluctuating field is the overlap between equilibrium configurations. We apply it to the case of constrained liquids for which the introduction…