Entropic Origin of the Growth of Relaxation Times in Simple Glassy Liquids

Abstract

Transitions between ``glassy'' local minima of a model free-energy functional for a dense hard-sphere system are studied numerically using a ``microcanonical'' Monte Carlo method that enables us to obtain the transition probability as a function of the free energy and the Monte Carlo ``time''. The growth of the height of the effective free energy barrier with density is found to be consistent with a Vogel-Fulcher law. The dependence of the transition probability on time indicates that this growth is primarily due to entropic effects arising from the difficulty of finding low-free-energy saddle points connecting glassy minima.

Four pages, plus three postscript figures

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