Facets of glass physics

Abstract

Glasses constitute a widespread form of solid matter, and glass production has been an important human technology for more than 3000 years. Despite that long history, new ways to understand the fundamental physics of glasses continue to emerge.

13 pages, 5 figures. To appear in the January 2016 issue of Physics Today (in press)

References in corpus (5)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Fractal free energy landscapes in structural glasses
• Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localised soft modes
• Dynamic heterogeneity in amorphous materials
• Suppression of tunneling two-level systems in ultrastable glasses of indomethacin

Cited by in corpus (41)

• Towards a theory of metastability in open quantum dynamics
• Perspective: Nonequilibrium glassy dynamics in dense systems of active particles
• Ergodicity and large deviations in physical systems with stochastic dynamics
• Perspective: Configurational entropy of glass-forming liquids
• Active glasses
• Origin of ultrastability in vapor-deposited glasses
• Predicting dynamic heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids by physics-inspired machine learning
• The race to the bottom: approaching the ideal glass?
• Johari-Goldstein relaxation far below Tg: Experimental evidence for the Gardner transition in structural glasses?
• Ultrastable metallic glasses in silico
• Density controls the kinetic stability of ultrastable glasses
• Real Space Analysis of Colloidal Gels: Triumphs, Challenges and Future Directions
• How to "measure" a structural relaxation time that is too long to be measured?
• A localization transition underlies the mode-coupling crossover of glasses
• Two-step devitrification of ultrastable glasses
• The melting of stable glasses is governed by nucleation-and-growth dynamics
• Coupling between criticality and gelation in "sticky" spheres: A structural analysis
• Reversing strain deformations probe mechanisms for enhanced segmental mobility of polymer glasses
• Real Space Renormalization Group Theory of Disordered Models of Glasses
• Statistical mechanics of coupled supercooled liquids in finite dimensions
• Linking the dielectric Debye process in 2-ethyl-1-hexanol to its density fluctuations
• Emergent kinetic constraints in open quantum systems
• Combined Description of Pressure-Volume-Temperature and Dielectric Relaxation of Several Polymeric and Low-Molecular-Weight Organic Glass-Formers using 'SL-TS2' Mean-Field Approach
• Structural-dynamical transition in the Wahnström mixture
• Intermolecular distance and density scaling of dynamics in molecular liquids
• Front propagation in ultrastable glasses is dynamically heterogeneous
• High-pressure cell for simultaneous dielectric and neutron spectroscopy
• A phase space approach to supercooled liquids and a universal collapse of their viscosity
• The Devil is in the details: Pentagonal bipyramids and dynamic arrest
• Monte Carlo simulations of glass-forming liquids beyond Metropolis
• Pressure densification of a simple liquid
• Electronic structure and glass forming ability in early and late transition metal alloys
• On the origin of bulk glass forming ability in Cu-Hf, Zr alloys
• Liquid dynamics in partially crystalline glycerol
• Spatial structure of unstable normal modes in a glass-forming liquid
• Ideal noncrystals: A possible new class of ordered matter without apparent broken symmetry
• Possible instability of one-step replica symmetry breaking in p-spin Ising models outside mean-field theory
• Time-resolved thermal lens spectroscopy of glassy dynamics in supercooled liquids: theory and experiments
• Collective dynamics in a glass-former with Mari-Kurchan interactions
• General Two-Parameter Model of Alpha-Relaxation in Glasses
• Molecular motion at the experimental glass transition