We show in numerical simulations that a system of two coupled replicas of a binary mixture of hard spheres undergoes a phase transition in equilibrium at a density slightly smaller than the glass transition density for an unreplicated system. This result is in agreement with the theories that predict that such a transition is a precursor of the standard ideal glass transition. The critical properties are compatible with those of an Ising system. The relations of this approach to the conventional approach based on configurational entropy are briefly discussed.
Spin glasses are a longstanding model for the sluggish dynamics that appears at the glass transition. However, spin glasses differ from structural glasses for a crucial feature: they enjoy a time reversal symmetry. This symmetry can be broken by applying an external magnetic field, but embarrassingly little is known about the critical behaviour of a spin glass in a field. In this context, the space dimension is crucial. Simulations are easier to interpret in a large number of dimensions, but one must work below the upper critical dimension (i.e., in d<6) in order for results to have relevance for experiments. Here we show conclusive evidence for the presence of a phase transition in a four-dimensional spin glass in a field. Two ingredients were crucial for this achievement: massive numerical simulations were carried out on the Janus special-purpose computer, and a new and powerful finite-size scaling method.
We develop a full microscopic replica field theory of the dynamical transition in glasses. By studying the soft modes that appear at the dynamical temperature we obtain an effective theory for the critical fluctuations. This analysis leads to several results: we give expressions for the mean field critical exponents, and we study analytically the critical behavior of a set of four-points correlation functions from which we can extract the dynamical correlation length. Finally, we can obtain a Ginzburg criterion that states the range of validity of our analysis. We compute all these quantities within the Hypernetted Chain Approximation (HNC) for the Gibbs free energy and we find results that are consistent with numerical simulations.
The statics-dynamics correspondence in spin glasses relate non-equilibrium results on large samples (the experimental realm) with equilibrium quantities computed on small systems (the typical arena for theoretical computations). Here we employ statics-dynamics equivalence to study the Ising spin-glass critical behavior in three dimensions. By means of Monte Carlo simulation, we follow the growth of the coherence length (the size of the glassy domains), on lattices too large to be thermalized. Thanks to the large coherence lengths we reach, we are able to obtain accurate results in excellent agreement with the best available equilibrium computations. To do so, we need to clarify the several physical meanings of the dynamic exponent close to the critical temperature.
We have investigated the phase transition in the Heisenberg spin glass using massive numerical simulations to study larger sizes, 48x48x48, than have been attempted before at a spin glass phase transition. A finite-size scaling analysis indicates that the data is compatible with the most economical scenario: a common transition temperature for spins and chiralities.
We study the glass and jamming transition of finite-dimensional models of simple liquids: hard- spheres, harmonic spheres and more generally bounded pair potentials that modelize frictionless spheres in interaction. At finite temperature, we study their glassy dynamics via field-theoretic methods by resorting to a mapping towards an effective quantum mechanical evolution, and show that such an approach resolves several technical problems encountered with previous attempts. We then study the static, mean-field version of their glass transition via replica theory, and set up an expansion in terms of the corresponding static order parameter. Thanks to this expansion, we are able to make a direct and exact comparison between historical Mode-Coupling results and replica theory. Finally we study these models at zero temperature within the hypotheses of the random-first-order-transition theory, and are able to derive a quantitative mean-field theory of the jamming transition. The theoretic methods of field theory and liquid theory used in this work are presented in a mostly self-contained, and hopefully pedagogical, way. This manuscript is a corrected version of my PhD thesis, defended in June, 29th, under the advisorship of Frederic van Wijland, and also contains the result of collaborations with Ludovic Berthier and Francesco Zamponi. The PhD work was funded by a CFM-JP Aguilar grant, and conducted in the Laboratory MSC at Universite Denis Diderot--Paris 7, France.