No Arabic abstract
Due to high viscosity, glassy systems evolve slowly to the ordered state. Results of molecular dynamics simulation reveal that the structural ordering in glasses becomes observable over experimental (finite) time-scale for the range of phase diagram with high values of pressure. We show that the structural ordering in glasses at such conditions is initiated through the nucleation mechanism, and the mechanism spreads to the states at extremely deep levels of supercooling. We find that the scaled values of the nucleation time, $tau_1$ (average waiting time of the first nucleus with the critical size), in glassy systems as a function of the reduced temperature, $widetilde{T}$, are collapsed onto a single line reproducible by the power-law dependence. This scaling is supported by the simulation results for the model glassy systems for a wide range of temperatures as well as by the experimental data for the stoichiometric glasses at the temperatures near the glass transition.
The design of multi-functional BMGs is limited by the lack of a quantitative understanding of the variables that control the glass-forming ability (GFA) of alloys. Both geometric frustration (e.g. differences in atomic radii) and energetic frustration (e.g. differences in the cohesive energies of the atomic species) contribute to the GFA. We perform molecular dynamics simulations of binary Lennard-Jones mixtures with only energetic frustration. We show that there is little correlation between the heat of mixing and critical cooling rate $R_c$, below which the system crystallizes, except that $Delta H_{rm mix} < 0$. By removing the effects of geometric frustration, we show strong correlations between $R_c$ and the variables $epsilon_- = (epsilon_{BB}-epsilon_{AA})/(epsilon_{AA}+epsilon_{BB})$ and ${overline epsilon}_{AB} = 2epsilon_{AB}/(epsilon_{AA}+epsilon_{BB})$, where $epsilon_{AA}$ and $epsilon_{BB}$ are the cohesive energies of atoms $A$ and $B$ and $epsilon_{AB}$ is the pair interaction between $A$ and $B$ atoms. We identify a particular $f_B$-dependent combination of $epsilon_-$ and ${overline epsilon}_{AB}$ that collapses the data for $R_c$ over nearly $4$ orders of magnitude in cooling rate.
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. To test this hypothesis, we use numerical simulation data from four glass-forming models to construct coarse grained observables that probe the dynamical heterogeneity, and decompose the fluctuations of these observables into two transverse components associated with the postulated time-fluctuation soft modes and a longitudinal component unrelated to them. We find that as temperature is lowered and timescales are increased, the time reparametrization fluctuations become increasingly dominant, and that their correlation volumes grow together with the correlation volumes of the dynamical heterogeneities, while the correlation volumes for longitudinal fluctuations remain small.
We study a lattice model of attractive colloids. It is exactly solvable on sparse random graphs. As the pressure and temperature are varied it reproduces many characteristic phenomena of liquids, glasses and colloidal systems such as ideal gel formation, liquid-glass phase coexistence, jamming, or the reentrance of the glass transition.
Hydrated granular packings often crack into discrete clusters of grains when dried. Despite its ubiquity, accurate prediction of cracking remains elusive. Here, we elucidate the previously overlooked role of individual grain shrinkage---a feature common to many materials---in determining crack patterning using both experiments and simulations. By extending the classical Griffith crack theory, we obtain a scaling law that quantifies how cluster size depends on the interplay between grain shrinkage, stiffness, and size---applicable to a diverse array of shrinkable, granular packings.
One of the most fundamental problems in quantum many-body physics is the characterization of correlations among thermal states. Of particular relevance is the thermal area law, which justifies the tensor network approximations to thermal states with a bond dimension growing polynomially with the system size. In the regime of sufficiently low temperatures, which is particularly important for practical applications, the existing techniques do not yield optimal bounds. Here, we propose a new thermal area law that holds for generic many-body systems on lattices. We improve the temperature dependence from the original $mathcal{O}(beta)$ to $tilde{mathcal{O}}(beta^{2/3})$, thereby suggesting diffusive propagation of entanglement by imaginary time evolution. This qualitatively differs from the real-time evolution which usually induces linear growth of entanglement. We also prove analogous bounds for the Renyi entanglement of purification and the entanglement of formation. Our analysis is based on a polynomial approximation to the exponential function which provides a relationship between the imaginary-time evolution and random walks. Moreover, for one-dimensional (1D) systems with $n$ spins, we prove that the Gibbs state is well-approximated by a matrix product operator with a sublinear bond dimension of $e^{sqrt{tilde{mathcal{O}}(beta log(n))}}$. This proof allows us to rigorously establish, for the first time, a quasi-linear time classical algorithm for constructing an MPS representation of 1D quantum Gibbs states at arbitrary temperatures of $beta = o(log(n))$. Our new technical ingredient is a block decomposition of the Gibbs state, that bears resemblance to the decomposition of real-time evolution given by Haah et al., FOCS18.