Related papers: Surface defreezing of glasses
By introducing finite size surface and interfacial excess quantities, interactions between interfaces are shown to modify the usual surface premelting phenomenon. It is the case of surface melting of a thin solid film s deposited on a…
The effect of cooling on the brittleness of glasses in general, and bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) in particular, is usually studied with continuously varying cooling rates; slower cooling rates lead to stiffer, harder, and more brittle…
Glass is a liquid that has lost its ability to flow. Why this particular substance undergoes its dramatic slowing down in kinetics while remaining barely distinguishable in structure from the fluid state upon cooling constitutes the central…
We study phase behaviour of a model fluid confined between two unlike parallel walls in the presence of long range (dispersion) forces. Predictions obtained from macroscopic (geometric) and mesoscopic arguments are compared with numerical…
Thin polymer films have striking dynamical properties that differ from their bulk counterparts. With the simple geometry of a stepped polymer film on a substrate, we probe mobility above and below the glass transition temperature…
Freezing in the vicinity of water-vapor interfaces is of considerable interest to a wide range of disciplines, most notably the atmospheric sciences. In this work, we use molecular dynamics and two advanced sampling techniques, forward flux…
Free surfaces of liquids exhibit thermally excited (capillary) surface waves. We show that the surface roughness which results from capillary waves when a glassy material is cooled below the glass transition temperature can have a large…
We overview several recent experimental and numerical observations, which are at odds with the Vortex Glass theory of the freezing of disordered vortex matter. To reinvestigate the issue, we performed numerical simulations of the overdamped…
We assess the relative importance of spatial congestion and lowered temperature in the slowing dynamics of supercooled glycerol near the glass transition. We independently vary both volume, V, and temperature, T, by applying high pressure…
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…
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…
We review the search for the glass transition in water in its various amorphous forms, and highlight the paradoxes that the search has produced. Focussing on the glassy form of water obtained by hyperquenching, we examine its reported…
We have studied the liquid - solid (L-S) phase transition of ^4He confined in nanoporous glass, which has interconnected nanopores of 2.5 nm in diameter. The L-S boundary is determined by the measurements of pressure and thermal response…
Although ubiquitous in nature and industrial processes, transport processes at the interface during evaporation and condensation are still poorly understood. Experiments have shown temperature discontinuities at the interface during…
We present an extensive but concise review of our present understanding, largely based on theory and simulation work from our group, on the equilibrium behavior of solid surfaces and nanosystems close to the bulk melting point. In the first…
Glasses are out-of-equilibrium systems aging under the crystallization threat. During ordinary glass formation, the atomic diffusion slows down rendering its experimental investigation impractically long, to the extent that a timescale…
Freezing is a fundamental physical phenomenon that has been studied over many decades; yet the role played by surfaces in determining nucleation has remained elusive. Here we report direct computational evidence of surface induced…
Latest since the landmark studies of Kovacs and co-workers on the glass transition of polymers, it is clear that thermally induced volume changes are of central importance for the understanding of the nature of the glass transition. Due to…
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…
When cooled down, emulsion droplets stabilized by a frozen interface of alkane molecules and surfactants have been observed to undergo a spectacular sequence of morphological transformations: from spheres to faceted icosahedra, down to…