The Glass Transition: From Competing Theories to Discriminating Tests

Abstract

The dramatic slowing down of liquids approaching the glass transition remains unresolved, partly because competing theoretical explanations are difficult to discriminate. Indeed, several mature, contrasting frameworks account for the main features of glassy phenomenology, making agreement with familiar observations a weak basis for identifying the microscopic mechanism responsible for the slowdown. Recent numerical advances are changing this situation in two complementary ways. Deep equilibration extends controlled equilibrium studies into regimes previously accessible only by extrapolation, allowing established predictions to be stress-tested over a broader dynamical range. At the same time, new numerical methods increasingly provide direct access to theory-specific quantities such as configurational entropy, static lengths, elastic properties, and local activation barriers. I discuss how these developments constrain thermodynamic, facilitation-based, elastic, and excitation-based descriptions. The emerging picture is not yet a unique theory, but a set of increasingly discriminating tests that can reveal where apparently successful laws cease to be universal and identify the microscopic ingredients that causally control the activation barrier.

arXiv commentPerspective, 2 figures

References in corpus (37)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Theory of Structural Glasses and Supercooled Liquids
• Glassy dynamics of kinetically constrained models
• Dynamics on the Way to Forming Glass: Bubbles in Space-time
• The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
• Identifying structural flow defects in disordered solids using machine learning methods
• Models and algorithms for the next generation of glass transition studies
• The Relationship of Dynamical Heterogeneity to the Adam-Gibbs and Random First-Order Transition Theories of Glass Formation
• Corresponding States of Structural Glass Formers
• Mode-Coupling Theory of the Glass Transition: A Primer
• Fast Monte Carlo algorithm for supercooled soft spheres
• Avalanches and Dynamical Correlations in supercooled liquids
• Elastically Cooperative Activated Barrier Hopping Theory of Relaxation in Viscous Fluids. I. General Formulation and Application to Hard Sphere Fluids
• Excitations are localized and relaxation is hierarchical in glass-forming liquids
• Elastically Cooperative Activated Barrier Hopping Theory of Relaxation in Viscous Fluids. II. Thermal Liquids
• Exact theory of dense amorphous hard spheres in high dimension. III. The full RSB solution
• The building blocks of dynamical heterogeneities in dense granular media
• Direct measurements of growing amorphous order and non-monotonic dynamic correlations in a colloidal glass-former
• Corresponding States of Structural Glass Formers. II
• Microscopic origin of excess wings in relaxation spectra of supercooled liquids
• Does a growing static length scale control the glass transition?
• Polymer Glass Formation: Role of Activation Free Energy, Configurational Entropy, and Collective Motion
• Does the Adam-Gibbs relation hold in simulated supercooled liquids?
• Elasticity, Facilitation and Dynamic Heterogeneity in Glass-Forming liquids
• Can the glass transition be explained without a growing static length scale?
• Relevance of Shear Transformations in the Relaxation of Supercooled Liquids
• Efficient measurement of point-to-set correlations and overlap fluctuations in glass-forming liquids
• Dynamic and thermodynamic crossover scenarios in the Kob-Andersen mixture: Insights from multi-CPU and multi-GPU simulations
• Scaling Description of Dynamical Heterogeneity and Avalanches of Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids
• Generalized mode-coupling theory of the glass transition: schematic results at finite and infinite order
• Many-body correlations are non-negligible in both fragile and strong glassformers
• Local Plastic Response and Slow Heterogeneous Dynamics of Supercooled Liquids
• Clever algorithms for glasses work by time reparametrization
• Molecular motion at the experimental glass transition
• Starting from the amorphous ground state: linking landscape thermodynamics to slow dynamics and crossover
• Does mesoscopic elasticity control viscous slowing down in glassforming liquids?
• Static self-induced heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids: Overlap as a microscope