No Arabic abstract
The specific heat capacity $c_v$ of glass formers undergoes a hysteresis when subjected to a cooling-heating cycle, with a larger $c_v$ and a more pronounced hysteresis for fragile glasses than for strong ones. Here, we show that these experimental features, including the unusually large magnitude of $c_v$ of fragile glasses, are well reproduced by kinetic Monte Carlo and equilibrium study of a distinguishable particle lattice model (DPLM) incorporating a two-state picture of particle interactions. The large $c_v$ in fragile glasses is caused by a dramatic transfer of probabilistic weight from high-energy particle interactions to low-energy ones as temperature decreases.
Using a distinguishable-particle lattice model based on void-induced dynamics, we successfully reproduce the well-known linear relation between heat capacity and temperature at very low temperatures. The heat capacity is dominated by two-level systems formed due to strong localization of voids to two neighboring sites, and can be exactly calculated in the limit of ultrastable glasses. Similar but weaker localization at higher temperatures accounts for the glass transition. Our approach provides an unified framework for relating microscopic dynamics of glasses at room and cryogenic temperatures.
We study non-equilibrium phases for interacting two-dimensional self-propelled particles with isotropic pair-wise interactions using a persistent kinetic Monte Carlo (MC) approach. We establish the quantitative phase diagram, including the motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) that is a commonly observed collective phenomena in active matter. In addition, we demonstrate for several different potential forms the presence of two-step melting, with an intermediate hexatic phase, in regions far from equilibrium. Increased activity can melt a two-dimensional solid and the melting lines remain disjoint from MIPS. We establish this phase diagram for a range of the inter-particle potential stiffnesses, and identify the MIPS phase even in the hard-disk limit. We establish that the full description of the phase behavior requires three independent control parameters.
Population annealing is a recent addition to the arsenal of the practitioner in computer simulations in statistical physics and beyond that is found to deal well with systems with complex free-energy landscapes. Above all else, it promises to deliver unrivaled parallel scaling qualities, being suitable for parallel machines of the biggest calibre. Here we study population annealing using as the main example the two-dimensional Ising model which allows for particularly clean comparisons due to the available exact results and the wealth of published simulational studies employing other approaches. We analyze in depth the accuracy and precision of the method, highlighting its relation to older techniques such as simulated annealing and thermodynamic integration. We introduce intrinsic approaches for the analysis of statistical and systematic errors, and provide a detailed picture of the dependence of such errors on the simulation parameters. The results are benchmarked against canonical and parallel tempering simulations.
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to control the strength of an attraction between particles and multispeckle x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to determine the particles collective dynamics. This model system undergoes a glass transition both on cooling and on heating, and the intermediate liquid realizes unusual logarithmic relaxations. How vitrification occurs for the two different glass transitions is characterized in detail and comparisons are drawn to recent theoretical predictions for glass formation in systems with attractive interactions.
We study the XY spin glass by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for sizes up to 24^3, down to temperatures below the transition temperature found in earlier work. The data for the larger sizes show more marginal behavior than that for the smaller sizes indicating that the lower critical dimension is close to, and possibly equal to three. We find that the spins and chiralities behave in a very similar manner. We also address the optimal ratio of over-relaxation to Metropolis sweeps in the simulation.