Colloidal suspensions are characterized by a variety of microscopic interactions, which generate unconventional phase diagrams encompassing fluid, gel and glassy states and offer the possibility to study new phase and/or state transitions. Among these, glass-glass transitions are rare to be found, especially at ambient conditions. Here, through a combination of dilution experiments, X-ray photo...

This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the most intriguing features of glassy behavior, but are too unrealistic to provide bases for predictive theories. As illustrations of what I mean, the first part...

The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, via a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations between dynamic and thermodynamic properties of glass-forming liquids. I argue here that critically large excitation chains play a role roughly analogous to that pl...

Abstract. The role of reflection symmetry breaking for the character of the appearance of replica symmetric spin glass state is investigated. We establish the following symmetry rule for classical systems with one order parameter in the replica symmetric mean field approximation. If in the pure system the transition to the ordered phase is of the second order, then in the corresponding random s...

By combining thermostimulated current and dynamic dielectric spectroscopies, the dielectric properties characteristic of the molecular mobility can be described over a very broad frequency range. The study of dielectric relaxations of phosphorus-containing dendrimers in the sub-glass transition region, and of poly(n-alkyl methacrylates) at and above the glass transition region allows us to gain...

The glass transition is a complex, non-equilibrium physical phenomenon and despite the numerous efforts expended in the last three decades, the mechanisms governing the glass transition continue to raise a lot of fundamental questions. Its study is of extreme importance from both academic and technological points of view. Several theoretical models have been developed to improve our understandi...

The past decade has seen a resurgence in the study of the glass transition, particularly using computational approaches. Advances in computer architectures and algorithms have allowed the study of larger system sizes for longer time scales, which has enabled computational scientists to explore both new aspects of supercooled liquids, glasses, and the glass transition, as well as to re-investiga...

We introduce a structural quantity to probe the glass transition. This quantity is a linear generalized compressibility which depends solely on the positions of the particles. We have performed a molecular dynamics simulation on a glass-forming liquid consisting of a two-component mixture of soft spheres in three dimensions. As the temperature is lowered (or as the density is increased), the ge...

A glassy state of matter results if crystallization is avoided upon cooling or increasing density. However, the physical factors controlling the ease of vitrification and nature of the glass transition remain elusive. Using numerical simulations of polydisperse hard disks, we find a direct relation between medium-range crystalline ordering and the slow dynamics which characterizes the glass tra...

A fundamental problem of glass transition is to provide a quantitative and microscopic explanation of the heat-capacity jump at the glass transition temperature Tg . Similar problems are also common to other disordered systems, including spin glasses. We propose that the jump of heat capacity at Tg takes place as a result of the change of the liquid’s elastic, vibrational, and thermal propertie...