Related papers: Surface defreezing of glasses
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
Water interactions with organic surfaces are of central importance in biological systems and many Earth system processes. Here we describe experimental studies of water collisions and uptake kinetics on liquid and solid butanol from 160 to…
Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the…
We investigate a subfreezing droplet impact scenario in a low-humidity environment, where the target is a cold granular monolayer. When the undercooling degree of targets passes a threshold, such a granular layer effectively postpones the…
This review deals with the kinetic and thermodynamic fragility of bulk metallic glass forming liquids. The experimental methods to determine the kinetic fragility, relaxation behavior and thermodynamic functions of undercooled metallic…
We address an experimental investigation of evaporation waves. These waves appear when a liquid contained in a vertical glass tube is suddenly depressurized from a high initial pressure down to the atmospheric one. The state of the liquid…
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…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
The nature of the glass transition is theoretically understood in the mean-field limit of infinite spatial dimensions, but the problem remains totally open in physical dimensions. Nontrivial finite-dimensional fluctuations are hard to…
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…
Glasses are mechanically rigid, still undergo structural relaxation which changes their properties and affects potential technological applications. Understanding the underlying physical processes is a problem of broad theoretical and…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
The surface of a polar liquid presents a special environment for the solvation and organization of charged solutes, which differ from bulk behaviors in important ways. These differences have motivated many attempts to understand…
We study the influence of the liquid-vapor surface on the crystallization kinetics of supercooled metal alloys. While a good glass former, $\rm{Cu}_{50}\rm{Zr}_{50}$, shows no evidence of surface enhancement of crystallization,…
We present experimental and theoretical results for the surface topography of a plastically deformed metallic (aluminum) block. When a hard spherical body (here a steel-, silica glass- or silicon nitride ball) with a smooth surface is…
The Leidenfrost effect-prolonged evaporation of droplets on a superheated surface-happens only when the surface temperature is above a certain transitional value. Here, we show that specially engineered droplets - liquid marbles - can…
In this study, micro-droplets are placed on thin, glassy, free-standing films where the Laplace pressure of the droplet deforms the free-standing film, creating a bulge. The film's tension is modulated by changing temperature continuously…
The temperature dependence of the viscosity of glass is a major concern in the field of glass research. Strong deviations from the Arrhenius law make the interpretation of the activation energy difficult. In the present study, a reasonable…
The Leidenfrost phenomenon entails the levitation of a liquid droplet over a superheated surface, cushioned by its vapor layer. For water, superhydrophobic surfaces are believed to suppress the Leidenfrost point ($\it{T}$$_{\rm L}$)-the…
The development of microfluidic devices has recently revived the interest in "old" problems associated with transport at, or across, interfaces. As the characteristic sizes are decreased, the use of pressure gradients to transport fluids…