No Arabic abstract
The recent description of the cooling through the glass transition in terms of irreversible structural Eshelby rearrangements with a single average fictive temperature is extended to a distribution of fictive temperatures around the average one. The extension has only little influence on the cooling scans, but turns out to be necessary to understand the heating back to equilibrium.
The recent Eshelby description of the highly viscous flow leads to the prediction of a factor of two different viscosities in stationary and alternating flow, in agreement with experimental evidence. The Kohlrausch barrier density increase with increasing barrier height finds a physical justification in the Adam-Gibbs increase of the number of structural alternatives of the Eshelby region with its increasing size. The new Ansatz allows to determine the number of atoms or molecules in the rearranging Eshelby domains from a combination of dynamic shear relaxation and calorimetric data.
The recent description of the highly viscous flow in terms of irreversible structural Eshelby rearrangements is extended to calculate the heat capacity of a glass former at a constant cooling rate through the glass transition. The result is compared to measured data from the literature, showing that the explanation works both for polymers and other glass formers.
Experiments on spin glasses can now make precise measurements of the exponent $z(T)$ governing the growth of glassy domains, while our computational capabilities allow us to make quantitative predictions for experimental scales. However, experimental and numerical values for $z(T)$ have differed. We use new simulations on the Janus II computer to resolve this discrepancy, finding a time-dependent $z(T, t_w)$, which leads to the experimental value through mild extrapolations. Furthermore, theoretical insight is gained by studying a crossover between the $T = T_c$ and $T = 0$ fixed points.
Aging has become the paradigm to describe dynamical behavior of glassy systems, and in particular spin glasses. Trap models have been introduced as simple caricatures of effective dynamics of such systems. In this Letter we show that in a wide class of mean field models and on a wide range of time scales, aging occurs precisely as predicted by the REM-like trap model of Bouchaud and Dean. This is the first rigorous result about aging in mean field models except for the REM and the spherical model.
We present a numerical investigation of the density fluctuations in a model glass under cyclic shear deformation. At low amplitude of shear, below yielding, the system reaches a steady absorbing state in which density fluctuations are suppressed revealing a clear fingerprint of hyperuniformity up to a finite length scale. The opposite scenario is observed above yielding, where the density fluctuations are strongly enhanced. We demonstrate that the transition to this state is accompanied by a spatial phase separation into two distinct hyperuniform regions, as a consequence of shear band formation above the yield amplitude.