On the critical behavior of the specific heat in glass-formers

Abstract

We show numeric evidence that, at low enough temperatures, the potential energy density of a glass-forming liquid fluctuates over length scales much larger than the interaction range. We focus on the behavior of translationally invariant quantities. The growing correlation length is unveiled by studying the Finite Size effects. In the thermodynamic limit, the specific heat and the relaxation time diverge as a power law. Both features point towards the existence of a critical point in the metastable supercooled liquid phase.

Version to be published in Phys. Rev. E

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• Structural and dynamical heterogeneity in a glass forming liquid
• Growing static and dynamic length scales in a glass-forming liquid
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• Computer simulations of the glass transition and glassy materials
• On the protocol dependence of plasticity in ultra-stable amorphous solids
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• Specific heat anomaly in a supercooled liquid with amorphous boundary conditions
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• On the static length of relaxation and the origin of dynamic heterogeneity in fragile glass-forming liquids