Evidence for a disordered critical point in a glass-forming liquid

Abstract

Using computer simulations of an atomistic glass-forming liquid, we investigate the fluctuations of the overlap between a fluid configuration and a quenched reference system. We find that large fluctuations of the overlap develop as temperature decreases, consistent with the existence of the random critical point that is predicted by effective field theories. We discuss the scaling of fluctuations near the presumed critical point, comparing the observed behaviour with that of the random-field Ising model. We argue that this critical point directly reveals the existence of an interfacial tension between amorphous metastable states, a quantity relevant both for equilibrium relaxation and for nonequilibrium melting of stable glass configurations.

4 figs, 5 pages

References in corpus (6)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Spontaneous and induced dynamic fluctuations in glass-formers I: General results and dependence on ensemble and dynamics
• Spontaneous and induced dynamic correlations in glass-formers II: Model calculations and comparison to numerical simulations
• Equilibrium ultrastable glasses produced by random pinning
• Constructing explicit magnetic analogies for the dynamics of glass forming liquids
• Origin of the Growing Length Scale in M-p-Spin Glass Models

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Perspective: Highly stable vapor-deposited glasses
• Modern computational studies of the glass transition
• Does the configurational entropy of polydisperse particles exist?
• Thermodynamic crossovers in supercritical fluids
• Nonperturbative fluctuations and metastability in a simple model: from observables to microscopic theory and back
• Effects of random pinning on the potential energy landscape of a supercooled liquid
• Dynamical Facilitation Governs the Equilibration Dynamics of Glasses
• Is glass a state of matter?
• Static self-induced heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids: Overlap as a microscope