0000000000192120

AUTHOR

Piero Tartaglia

Test of molecular mode coupling theory for general rigid molecules

We report recent progress on the test of mode coupling theory for molecular liquids (MMCT) for molecules of arbitrary shape. The MMCT equations in the long time limit are solved for supercooled water including all molecular degrees of freedom. In contrast to our earlier treatment of water as a linear molecule, we find that the glass-transition temperature ${T}_{c}$ is overestimated by the theory as was found in the case of simple liquids. The nonergodicity parameters are calculated from the ``full'' set of MMCT equations truncated at ${l}_{\mathrm{co}}=2.$ These results are compared (i) with the nonergodicity parameters from MMCT with ${l}_{\mathrm{co}}=2$ in the ``dipole'' approximation ${…

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Aging as dynamics in configuration space

The relaxation dynamics of many disordered systems, such as structural glasses, proteins, granular materials or spin glasses, is not completely frozen even at very low temperatures. This residual motion leads to a change of the properties of the material, a process commonly called aging. Despite recent advances in the theoretical description of such aging processes, the microscopic mechanisms leading to the aging dynamics are still a matter of dispute. In this Letter we investigate the aging dynamics of a simple glass former by means of molecular dynamics computer simulation. Using the concept of the inherent structure we give evidence that aging dynamics can be understood as a decrease of …

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Inherent structure entropy of supercooled liquids

We present a quantitative description of the thermodynamics in a supercooled binary Lennard Jones liquid via the evaluation of the degeneracy of the inherent structures, i.e. of the number of potential energy basins in configuration space. We find that for supercooled states, the contribution of the inherent structures to the free energy of the liquid almost completely decouples from the vibrational contribution. An important byproduct of the presented analysis is the determination of the Kauzmann temperature for the studied system. The resulting quantitative picture of the thermodynamics of the inherent structures offers new suggestions for the description of equilibrium and out-of-equilib…

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Molecular mode-coupling theory for supercooled liquids: application to water.

We present mode-coupling equations for the description of the slow dynamics observed in supercooled molecular liquids close to the glass transition. The mode-coupling theory (MCT) originally formulated to study the slow relaxation in simple atomic liquids, and then extended to the analysis of liquids composed by linear molecules, is here generalized to systems of arbitrarily shaped, rigid molecules. We compare the predictions of the theory for the $q$-vector dependence of the molecular nonergodicity parameters, calculated by solving numerically the molecular MCT equations in two different approximation schemes, with ``exact'' results calculated from a molecular dynamics simulation of superc…

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Test of the semischematic model for a liquid of linear molecules

We apply to a liquid of linear molecules the semischematic mode-coupling model, previously introduced to describe the center of mass (COM) slow dynamics of a network-forming molecular liquid. We compare the theoretical predictions and numerical results from a molecular dynamics simulation, both for the time and the wave-vector dependence of the COM density-density correlation function. We discuss the relationship between the presented analysis and the results from an approximate solution of the equations from molecular mode-coupling theory [R. Schilling and T. Scheidsteger, Phys. Rev. E 56 2932 (1997)].

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