Theories of Glass Formation and the Glass Transition

Abstract

This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the most intriguing features of glassy behavior, but are too unrealistic to provide bases for predictive theories. As illustrations of what I mean, the first part of this article is devoted to brief summaries of imaginative, sensible, but disparate and often contradictory ideas for solving glass problems. Almost all of these ideas remain alive today, with their own enthusiastic advocates. I then describe numerical simulations, mostly by H. Tanaka and coworkers, in which it appears that very simple, polydisperse systems of hard disks and spheres develop long range, Ising-like, bond-orientational order as they approach glass transitions. Finally, I summarize my recent proposal that topologically ordered clusters of particles, in disordered environments, tend to become aligned with each other as if they were two-state systems, and thus produce the observed Ising-like behavior. Neither Tanaka's results nor my proposed interpretation of them fit comfortably within any of the currently popular glass theories.

12 pages, 1 figure

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Cited by in corpus (34)

• Mode-Coupling Theory of the Glass Transition: A Primer
• Perspective: Configurational entropy of glass-forming liquids
• Active glasses
• Microscopic dynamics of supercooled liquids from first principles
• Theory of the Structural Glass Transition: A Pedagogical Review
• Deconstructing the glass transition through critical experiments on colloids
• Atomistic structural mechanism for the glass transition: Entropic contribution
• Roles of liquid structural ordering in glass transition, crystallization, and water's anomalies
• Equation of state of polydisperse hard-disk mixtures in the high-density regime
• Generalized mode-coupling theory of the glass transition: schematic results at finite and infinite order
• Connection between fragility, mean-squared displacement and shear modulus in two van der Waals bonded glass-forming liquids
• Non-equilibrium Kinetics of the Transformation of Liquids into Physical Gels
• Generalized mode-coupling theory of the glass transition. I. Numerical results for Percus-Yevick hard spheres
• Correlation between crystalline order and vitrification in colloidal monolayers
• Multi-component generalized mode-coupling theory: Predicting dynamics from structure in glassy mixtures
• A phase space approach to supercooled liquids and a universal collapse of their viscosity
• Impact of Spatial Dimension on Structural Ordering in Metallic Glass
• Pressure in the Landau-Ginzburg Functional: Pascal's Law, Nucleation in Fluid Mixtures, a Meanfield Theory of Amphiphilic Action, and Interface Wetting in Glassy Liquids
• Classical route to ergodicity and scarring in collective quantum systems
• Spatiotemporal intermittency and localized dynamic fluctuations upon approaching the glass transition
• A Dramatically Growing Shear Rigidity Length Scale in a Supercooled Glass Former ($NiZ{r}_2$)
• Suppressed Density of States in Self-Generated Coulomb Glasses
• Probing Local Structure in Glass by the Application of Shear
• Tagged-particle motion of Percus-Yevick hard spheres from first principles
• Size dependence of dynamic fluctuations in liquid and supercooled water
• Mean-field model for the Curie-Weiss temperature dependence of coherence length in metallic liquids
• Self-Supervised Learning for Glass Composition Screening
• Fragility index of a simple liquid from structural inputs
• Avoiding critical slowdown in models with SALR interactions
• Multicomponent solution solidification with arrested phase separation model for liquid-to-glass transition
• Glass theory: ground and excited states of coupled electron pairs
• Exploring the properties of quantum scars in a toy model
• Ergodicity in glass relaxation
• Vapor Condensed and Supercooled Glassy Nanoclusters