Related papers: Transitions between metastable states in silica cl…
In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet,…
All ground states and low-lying excitations of a +/- I Ising spin glass model on a cubic 4 x 4 x 4 lattice with periodical boundary conditions were calculated using a method of combinatorical optimization. The structure of states in the…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study spatially heterogeneous dynamics in a model of viscous silica above and below the critical temperature of the mode coupling theory, $T_{MCT}$. Specifically, we follow the evolution of…
In this paper we develop a method introduced by one of us to study metastable states in spin glasses. We consider a `potential function' defined as the free energy of a system at a given temperature $T$ constrained to have a fixed overlap…
A full understanding of glasses requires an accurate atomistic picture of the complex activated processes that constitute the low-temperature dynamics of these materials. To this end, we generate over five thousand activated events in…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
We present a new type of phase-change behavior relevant for information storage applications, that can be observed in 2D systems with cluster-forming ability. The temperature-based control of the ordering in 2D particle systems depends on…
The systematic identification of temperature scales in supercooled liquids that are key to understanding those liquids' underlying glass properties, and the latter's formation-history dependence, is a challenging task. Here we study the…
We investigate aging in glassy systems based on a simple model, where a point in configuration space performs thermally activated jumps between the minima of a random energy landscape. The model allows us to show explicitly a subaging…
The overlap, or similarity, between liquid configurations is at the core of the mean-field description of the glass transition, and remains a useful concept when studying three-dimensional glass-forming liquids. In liquids, however, the…
In this work, we revisit the fragile-to-strong transition (FTS) in the simulated BKS silica from the perspective of microscopic dynamics in an effort to elucidate the dynamical behaviors of fragile and strong glass-forming liquids.…
We study numerically the configuration space at low energy of electron glasses. We consider systems with Coulomb interactions, short-range interactions and no interactions. First, we calculate the integrated density of configurations as a…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
We formally extend the energy landscape approach for the thermodynamics of liquids to account for saddle points. By considering the extensive nature of macroscopic potential energies, we derive the scaling behavior of saddles with system…
Recent far-infrared vibration-rotation tunneling (FIR-VRT) experiments pose new challenges to theory because the interpretation and prediction of such spectra requires a detailed understanding of the potential energy surface (PES) away from…
We analyse biased ensembles of trajectories for the random-field Ising model on a fully-connected lattice, which is described exactly by mean-field theory. By coupling the activity of the system to a dynamical biasing field, we find a range…
We describe our perspective on the Structural Glass Transition (SGT) problem built on the premise that a viable theory must provide a consistent picture of the dynamics and statics, which are manifested by large increase in shear viscosity…
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…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
A simple geometrical characterization of configuration space neighborhoods of local energy minima in spin glass landscapes is found by exhaustive search. Combined with previous Monte Carlo investigations of thermal domain growth, it allows…