No Arabic abstract
Using the potential energy landscape formalism we show that, in the temperature range in which the dynamics of a glass forming system is thermally activated, there exists a unique set of basis glass states each of which is confined to a single metabasin of the energy landscape of a glass forming system. These basis glass states tile the entire configuration space of the system, exhibit only secondary relaxation and are solid-like. Any macroscopic state of the system (whether liquid or glass) can be represented as a superposition of basis glass states and can be described by a probability distribution over these states. During cooling of a liquid from a high temperature, the probability distribution freezes at sufficiently low temperatures describing the process of liquid to glass transition. The time evolution of the probability distribution towards the equilibrium distribution during subsequent aging describes the primary relaxation of a glass.
Using molecular dynamics simulations we investigate the dependence of the structural and vibrational properties of the surfaces of sodo-silicate glasses on the sodium content as well as the nature of the surface. Two types of glass surfaces are considered: A melt-formed surface (MS) in which a liquid with a free surface has been cooled down into the glass phase and a fracture surface (FS) obtained by tensile loading of a glass sample. We find that the MS is more abundant in Na and non-bridging oxygen atoms than the FS and the bulk glass, whereas the FS has higher concentration of structural defects such as two-membered rings and under-coordinated Si than the MS. We associate these structural differences to the production histories of the glasses and the mobility of the Na ions. It is also found that for Na-poor systems the fluctuations in composition and local atomic charge density decay with a power-law as a function of distance from the surface while Na-rich systems show an exponential decay with a typical decay length of $approx2.3$~AA. The vibrational density of states shows that the presence of the surfaces leads to a decrease of the characteristic frequencies in the system. The two-membered rings give rise to a pronounce band at $approx880$~cm$^{-1}$ which is in good agreement experimental observations.
We use a simple model to extend network models for activated dynamics to a continuous landscape with a well-defined notion of distance and a direct connection to many-body systems. The model consists of a tracer in a high-dimensional funnel landscape with no disorder. We find a non-equilibrium low-temperature phase with aging dynamics, that is effectively equivalent to that of models with built-in disorder, such as Trap Model, Step Model and REM.
As a guideline for experimental tests of the ideal glass transition (Random Pinning Glass Transition, RPGT) that shall be induced in a system by randomly pinning particles, we performed first-principle computations within the Hypernetted chain approximation and numerical simulations of a Hard Sphere model of glass-former. We obtain confirmation of the expected enhancement of glassy behaviour under the procedure of random pinning, which consists in freezing a fraction $c$ of randomly chosen particles in the positions they have in an equilibrium configuration. We present the analytical phase diagram as a function of $c$ and of the packing fraction $phi$, showing a line of RPGT ending in a critical point. We also obtain first microscopic results on cooperative length-scales characterizing medium-range amorphous order in Hard Spere glasses and indirect quantitative information on a key thermodynamic quantity defined in proximity of ideal glass transitions, the amorphous surface tension. Finally, we present numerical results of pair correlation functions able to differentiate the liquid and the glass phases, as predicted by the analytic computations.
Quasiperiodic modulation can prevent isolated quantum systems from equilibrating by localizing their degrees of freedom. In this article, we show that such systems can exhibit dynamically stable long-range orders forbidden in equilibrium. Specifically, we show that the interplay of symmetry breaking and localization in the quasiperiodic quantum Ising chain produces a emph{quasiperiodic Ising glass} stable at all energy densities. The glass order parameter vanishes with an essential singularity at the melting transition with no signatures in the equilibrium properties. The zero temperature phase diagram is also surprisingly rich, consisting of paramagnetic, ferromagnetic and quasiperiodically alternating ground state phases with extended, localized and critically delocalized low energy excitations. The system exhibits an unusual quantum Ising transition whose properties are intermediate between those of the clean and infinite randomness Ising transitions. Many of these results follow from a geometric generalization of the Aubry-Andre duality which we develop. The quasiperiodic Ising glass may be realized in near term quantum optical experiments.
We test a hypothesis for the origin of dynamical heterogeneity in slowly relaxing systems, namely that it emerges from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. We do this by constructing coarse grained observables and decomposing the fluctuations of these observables into transverse components, which are associated with the postulated time-fluctuation soft modes, and a longitudinal component, which represents the rest of the fluctuations. Our test is performed on data obtained in simulations of four models of structural glasses. As the hypothesis predicts, we find that the time reparametrization fluctuations become increasingly dominant as temperature is lowered and timescales are increased. More specifically, the ratio between the strengths of the transverse fluctuations and the longitudinal fluctuations grows as a function of the dynamical susceptibility, chi 4, which represents the strength of the dynamical heterogeneity; and the correlation volumes for the transverse fluctuations are approximately proportional to those for the dynamical heterogeneity, while the correlation volumes for the longitudinal fluctuations remain small and approximately constant.