Transport properties of glass forming liquids change markedly around an onset temperature To. For temperatures T above To, these properties depend little with T , while for T < To these properties are super -Arrhenius – varying faster than exponentially in 1/T . Upon lowering temperature significantly further, theory [1] predicts that reversible transport in a supercooled liquid, if it can be o...

Correlations in fluids in nonequilibrium steady states are long range. Hence, finite-size effects have important consequences in the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of fluids. One consequence is that nonequilibrium temperature fluctuations induce nonequilibrium Casimir-like pressures proportional to the square of the temperature gradient. Hence, fluctuations cause a breakdown of the concept of lo...

Building a general theoretical framework to describe the microscopic origin of macroscopic chirality in (colloidal) liquid crystals is a long-standing challenge. Here, we combine classical density functional theory with Monte Carlo calculations of virial-type coefficients to obtain the equilibrium cholesteric pitch as a function of thermodynamic state and microscopic details. Applying the theor...

We discuss some interesting physical features stemming from our previous analytical study of a simple model of a fluid with dipolarlike interactions of very short range in addition to the usual isotropic Baxter potential for adhesive spheres. While the isotropic part is found to rule the global structural and thermodynamical equilibrium properties of the fluid, the weaker anisotropic part gives...

We perform nonequilibrium dynamics simulations of a binary Lennard-Jones mixture in which an external force is applied on a single tagged particle. For the diffusive properties of this particle parallel to the force, superdiffusive behavior at intermediate times as well as giant long-time diffusivity is observed. A quantitative description of this nontrivial behavior is given by a continuous ti...

Casimir forces can appear between intrusions placed in different media driven by several fluctuation mechanisms, either in equilibrium or out of it. Herein, we develop a general formalism to obtain such forces from the dynamical equations of the fluctuating medium, the statistical properties of the driving noise, and the boundary conditions of the intrusions (which simulate the interaction betw...

We show that, in the equilibrium phase of glass-forming hard-sphere fluids in three dimensions, the static length scales tentatively associated with the dynamical slowdown and the dynamical length characterizing spatial heterogeneities in the dynamics unambiguously decorrelate. The former grow at a much slower rate than the latter when density increases. This observation is valid for the dynami...

We use extensive computer simulations to probe local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) in a quintessential model fluid, the two-dimensional hard-disks system. We show that macroscopic LTE is a property much stronger than previously anticipated, even in the presence of important finite-size effects, revealing a remarkable bulk-boundary decoupling phenomenon in fluids out of equilibrium. This allow...

Facilitated spin models were introduced some decades ago to mimic systems characterized by a glass transition. Recent developments have shown that a class of facilitated spin models is also able to reproduce characteristic signatures of the structural relaxation properties of glass-forming liquids. While the equilibrium phase diagram of these models can be calculated analytically, the dynamics ...

The equilibrium morphology of liquid drops exposed to geometric constraints can be rather complex. Even for simple geometries, analytical solutions are scarce. Here, we investigate the equilibrium shape and position of liquid drops confined in the wedge between two solid surfaces at an angle α. Using electrowetting, we control the contact angle and thereby manipulate the shape and the equilibri...