We report a novel method of detecting the glass --> liquid transition at high pressures, which comprises measuring the relative volume change incurred upon heating glassy samples into the liquid state. We show data on glycerol in the pressure range 0.050-1.00 GPa to demonstrate the viability of the method. The reversible glass --> liquid transition is observed by means of a kink in the relative...

Formation of bulk metallic glass in quaternary Ti-Zr-Cu-Ni alloys by relatively slow cooling from the melt is reported. Thick strips of metallic glass were obtained by the method of metal mold casting. The glass forming ability of the quaternary alloys exceeds that of binary or ternary alloys containing the same elements due to the complexity of the system. The best glass forming alloys such as...

The glass transition is investigated in three dimensions for single and double Yukawa potentials for the full range of control parameters. For vanishing screening parameter, the limit of the one-component plasma is obtained; for large screening parameters and high coupling strengths, the glass-transition properties cross over to the hard-sphere system. Between the two limits, the entire transit...

We present a novel theoretical approach to understanding the complex dynamics of glass-forming liquids, granular packings and amorphous solids. This theory, which is an elaboration of the free volume and inherent structure approaches, allows one to retrieve the thermodynamical properties of these systems from studies of geometrical and topological properties of local, static configurations alon...

The protein dynamical transition and its connection with the liquid-glass transition (GT) of hydration water and aqueous solvents are reviewed. The protein solvation shell exhibits a regular glass transition, characterized by steps in the specific heat and the thermal expansion coefficient at the calorimetric glass temperature T(G) approximately 170 K. It implies that the time scale of the stru...

Many food materials exist in a disordered amorphous solid state due to processing. Therefore, understanding the concept of amorphous state, its important phase transition (i.e., glass transition), and the related phenomena (e.g., enthalpy relaxation) is important to food scientists. Food saccharides, including mono-, di-, oligo-, and polysaccharides, are among the most important major component...

We study in Ising spin glasses the finite-size effects near the spin-glass transition in zero field and at the de Almeida-Thouless transition in a field by Monte Carlo methods and by analytical approximations. In zero field, the finite-size scaling function associated with the spin-glass susceptibility of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick mean-field spin-glass model is of the same form as that of one...

The aim of this study was to elucidate the role of the two main mechanisms used to explain the stabilization of proteins by sugar glasses during drying and subsequent storage: the vitrification and the water replacement theory. Although in literature protein stability is often attributed to either vitrification or water replacement, both mechanisms could play a role and they should be considere...

It is frequently assumed that in the limit of vanishing cooling rate, the glass transition phenomenon becomes a thermodynamic transition at a temperature TK. However, with any finite cooling rate, the system falls out of equilibrium at temperatures near Tg(>TK), implying that the very existence of the putative thermodynamic phase transition at TK can be questioned. Recent studies of systems wit...

We propose a new analytic approach to study the phase diagram of random heteropolymers, based on the cavity method. For copolymers we analyze the nature and phenomenology of the glass transition as a function of sequence correlations. Depending on these correlations, we find that two different scenarios for the glass transition can occur. We show that, beside the much studied possibility of an ...