No Arabic abstract
We introduce a three-dimensional lattice gas model to study the glass transition. In this model the interactions come from the excluded volume and particles have five arms with an asymmetrical shape, which results in geometric frustration that inhibits full packing. Each particle has two degrees of freedom, the position and the orientation of the particle. We find a second order phase transition at a density $rhoapprox 0.305$, this transition decouples the orientation of the particles which can rotate without interaction in this degree of freedom until $rho=0.5$ is reached. Both the inverse diffusivity and the relaxation time follow a power law behavior for densities $rhole 0.5$. The crystallization at $rho=0.5$ is avoided because frustration lets to the system to reach higher densities, then the divergencies are overcome. For $rho > 0.5 $ the orientations of the particles are coupled and the dynamics is governed by both degrees of freedom.
Understanding the physics of glass formation remains one of the major unsolved challenges of condensed matter science. As a material solidifies into a glass, it exhibits a spectacular slowdown of the dynamics upon cooling or compression, but at the same time undergoes only minute structural changes. Among the numerous theories put forward to rationalize this complex behavior, Mode-Coupling Theory (MCT) stands out as the only framework that provides a fully first-principles-based description of glass phenomenology. This review outlines the key physical ingredients of MCT, its predictions, successes, and failures, as well as recent improvements of the theory. We also discuss the extension and application of MCT to the emerging field of non-equilibrium active soft matter
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear equation of motion for the coherent scattering function in two and three space dimensions. A glass transition is observed for all coefficients of restitution, epsilon, at a critical packing fraction, phi_c(epsilon), below random close packing. The divergence of timescales at the glass-transition implies a dependence on compression rate upon further increase of the density - similar to the cooling rate dependence of a thermal glass. The critical dynamics for coherent motion as well as tagged particle dynamics is analyzed and shown to be non-universal with exponents depending on space dimension and degree of dissipation.
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to higher temperatures disordered systems (and vice versa) can hardly be overstated. Amorphous materials such as glasses seem to constitute a fundamental challenge to this paradigm. A long held dogma is that transitions into and out of an amorphous glassy state are distinctly different from typical equilibrium phase transitions and must call for radically different concepts. In this work, we critique this belief. We examine systems that may be viewed as simultaneous distribution of different ordinary equilibrium structures. In particular, we focus on the analogs of melting (or freezing) transitions in such distributed systems. The theory that we arrive at yields dynamical, structural, and thermodynamic behaviors of glasses and supercooled fluids that, for the properties tested thus far, are in qualitative and quantitative agreement with experiment. We arrive at a prediction for the viscosity and dielectric relaxations that is universally satisfied for all experimentally measured supercooled liquids and glasses over 15 decades.
The Frenkel Kontorova (FK) model is known to exhibit the so called Aubrys transition which is a jamming or frictional transition at zero temperature. Recently we found similar transition at zero and finite temperatures in a super-conducting Josephson junction array (JJA) on a square lattice under external magnetic field. In the present paper we discuss how these problems are related.
We present an extensive treatment of the generalized mode-coupling theory (GMCT) of the glass transition, which seeks to describe the dynamics of glass-forming liquids using only static structural information as input. This theory amounts to an infinite hierarchy of coupled equations for multi-point density correlations, the lowest-order closure of which is equivalent to standard mode-coupling theory. Here we focus on simplified schematic GMCT hierarchies, which lack any explicit wavevector-dependence and therefore allow for greater analytical and numerical tractability. For one particular schematic model, we derive the unique analytic solution of the infinite hierarchy, and demonstrate that closing the hierarchy at finite order leads to uniform convergence as the closure level increases. We also show numerically that a similarly robust convergence pattern emerges for more generic schematic GMCT models, suggesting that the GMCT framework is generally convergent, even though no small parameter exists in the theory. Finally, we discuss how different effective weights on the high-order contributions ultimately control whether the transition is continuous, discontinuous, or strictly avoided, providing new means to relate structure to dynamics in glass-forming systems.