Related papers: Exploring structural mechanisms in disordered mate…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
Understanding the dynamics of strongly interacting disordered quantum systems is one of the most challenging problems in modern science, due to features such as the breakdown of thermalization and the emergence of glassy phases of matter.…
The interplay between the structural relaxation and the rheological response of a binary LJ glass former is studied via MD simulations. In the quiescent state, the model is well known for its sluggish dynamics and a two step relaxation of…
At low temperatures the dynamical degrees of freedom in amorphous solids are tunnelling two-level systems (TLSs). Concentrating on these degrees of freedom, and taking into account disorder and TLS-TLS interactions, we obtain a "TLS-glass",…
Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is a widely studied non-crystalline material, and yet the subtle details of its atomistic structure are still unclear. Here, we show that accurate structural models of a-Si can be obtained by harnessing the power of…
The atomistic mechanisms occurring during the processes of aging and rejuvenation in glassy materials involve very small structural rearrangements that are extremely difficult to capture experimentally. Here we use in-situ X-ray diffraction…
The role of porous structure and glass density in response to compressive deformation of amorphous materials is investigated via molecular dynamics simulations. The disordered, porous structures were prepared by quenching a high-temperature…
We explore the structural signatures of excitations in amorphous materials with the atomic cluster expansion (ACE), a universal and complete linear basis of descriptors of the atomic environment. Body-orderd linear classifiers are…
The topological nature of the disorder of glasses and supercooled liquids strongly affects their high-frequency dynamics. In order to understand its main features, we analytically studied a simple topologically disordered model, where the…
A computation of the dynamical structure factor of topologically disordered systems, where the disorder can be described in terms of euclidean random matrices, is presented. Among others, structural glasses and supercooled liquids belong to…
The dynamic slowdown in glass-forming liquids remains a central topic in condensed matter science. Here, we report a theoretical investigation of the microscopic origin of the slowdown in amorphous silica, a prototypical strong glass former…
Force-constant and positional disorder have been introduced into diamond lattice models in an attempt to mimic the vibrational properties of a realistic amorphous silicon model. Neither type of disorder is sufficient on its own to mimic the…
The response of many materials to applied forces and boundary constraints depends upon internal geometric changes at multiple submacroscopic levels. Hierarchical structured deformations provide a mathematical setting for the description of…
Few questions in condensed matter science have proven as difficult to unravel as the interplay between structure and dynamics in supercooled liquids and glasses. The conundrum: close to the glass transition, the dynamics slow down…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
Active glassy matter has recently emerged as a novel class of non-equilibrium soft matter, combining energy-driven, active particle movement with dense and disordered glass-like behavior. Here we review the state-of-the-art in this field…
We present results on a series of 2D atomistic computer simulations of amorphous systems subjected to simple shear in the athermal, quasistatic limit. The athermal quasistatic trajectories are shown to separate into smooth, reversible…
We have extended our experimentally constrained molecular relaxation technique (P. Biswas {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. B {\bf 71} 54204 (2005)) to hydrogenated amorphous silicon: a 540-atom model with 7.4 % hydrogen and a 611-atom model with 22…
We develop a mesoscopic model to study the plastic behavior of an amorphous material under cyclic loading. The model is depinning-like and driven by a disordered thresholds dynamics which are coupled by long-range elastic interactions. We…
We describe a broadly-applicable theory of spin relaxation in materials with incoherent charge transport; examples include amorphous inorganic semiconductors, organic semiconductors, quantum dot arrays, and systems displaying…