Search results for "statistical"
showing 10 items of 4960 documents
The Ultimate Fate of Supercooled Liquids
2010
In recent years it has become widely accepted that a dynamical length scale {\xi}_{\alpha} plays an important role in supercooled liquids near the glass transition. We examine the implications of the interplay between the growing {\xi}_{\alpha} and the size of the crystal nucleus, {\xi}_M, which shrinks on cooling. We argue that at low temperatures where {\xi}_{\alpha} > {\xi}_M a new crystallization mechanism emerges enabling rapid development of a large scale web of sparsely connected crystallinity. Though we predict this web percolates the system at too low a temperature to be easily seen in the laboratory, there are noticeable residual effects near the glass transition that can account …
Statistical Thermodynamics of Polymer Quantum Systems
2011
Polymer quantum systems are mechanical models quantized similarly as loop quantum gravity. It is actually in quantizing gravity that the polymer term holds proper as the quantum geometry excitations yield a reminiscent of a polymer material. In such an approach both non-singular cosmological models and a microscopic basis for the entropy of some black holes have arisen. Also important physical questions for these systems involve thermodynamics. With this motivation, in this work, we study the statistical thermody- namics of two one dimensional polymer quantum systems: an ensemble of oscillators that describe a solid and a bunch of non-interacting particles in a box, which thus form an ideal…
Nanoscale heterogeneity if glass-forming liquids: experimental advances
1998
Abstract Recent evidence indicates that in supercooled liquids the cooperativity of molecular motion extends over certain temporal and spatial ranges. A key advance is the experimental and theoretical exploration of higher-order correlation functions that can track the molecular coordinates for more than just two points in time or space. Uncontested experimental determinations of the heterogeneity length scale at the glass transition remain a major goal.
Intramolecular phase separation of copolymer "bottle brushes": No sharp phase transition but a tunable length scale
2006
A lattice model for a symmetrical copolymer "bottle brush" molecule, where two types (A,B) of flexible side chains are grafted with one chain end to a rigid backbone, is studied by a variant of the pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method (PERM), allowing for simultaneous growth of all side chains in the Monte Carlo sampling. Choosing repulsive binary interactions between unlike monomers and varying the solvent quality, it is found that phase separation into an $A$-rich part of the cylindrical molecule and a $B$-rich part can occur only locally. Long range order (in the direction of the backbone) does not occur, and hence the transition from the randomly mixed state of the bottle brush to the phas…
Spatial correlations of mobility and immobility in a glass-forming Lennard-Jones liquid
1998
Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations of an equilibrium, glass-forming Lennard-Jones mixture, we characterize in detail the local atomic motions. We show that spatial correlations exist among particles undergoing extremely large (``mobile'') or extremely small (``immobile'') displacements over a suitably chosen time interval. The immobile particles form the cores of relatively compact clusters, while the mobile particles move cooperatively and form quasi-one-dimensional, stringlike clusters. The strength and length scale of the correlations between mobile particles are found to grow strongly with decreasing temperature, and the mean cluster size appears to diverge near the mode-cou…
Dynamical phase transitions and their relation to structural and thermodynamic aspects of glass physics.
2020
We review recent developments in structural–dynamical phase transitions in trajectory space based on dynamic facilitation theory. An open question is how the dynamic facilitation perspective on the glass transition may be reconciled with thermodynamic theories that posit collective reorganization accompanied by a growing static length scale and, eventually, a vanishing configurational entropy. In contrast, dynamic facilitation theory invokes a dynamical phase transition between an active phase (close to the normal liquid) and an inactive phase, which is glassy and whose order parameter is either a time-averaged dynamic or structural quantity. In particular, the dynamical phase transition in…
Do crossover functions depend on the shape of the interaction profile?
1999
We examine the crossover from classical to non-classical critical behaviour in two-dimensional systems with a one-component order parameter. Since the degree of universality of the corresponding crossover functions is still subject to debate, we try to induce non-universal effects by adding interactions with a second length scale. Although the crossover functions clearly depend on the range of the interactions, they turn out to be remarkably robust against further variation of the interaction profile. In particular, we find that the earlier observed non-monotonic crossover of the effective susceptibility exponent occurs for several qualitatively different shapes of this profile.
Can Soft Models Describe Polymer Knots?
2020
Similar to macroscopic ropes and cables, long polymers create knots. We address the fundamental question whether and under which conditions it is possible to describe these intriguing objects with crude models that capture only mesoscale polymer properties. We focus on melts of long polymers which we describe by a model typical for mesoscopic simulations. A worm-like chain model defines the polymer architecture. To describe nonbonded interactions, we deliberately choose a generic "soft" repulsive potential that leads to strongly overlapping monomers and coarse local liquid structure. The soft model is parametrized to accurately reproduce mesoscopic structure and conformations of reference p…
Growing length scales in a supercooled liquid close to an interface
2002
We present the results of molecular dynamics computer simulations of a simple glass former close to an interface between the liquid and the frozen amorphous phase of the same material. By investigating F_s(q,z,t), the incoherent intermediate scattering function for particles that have a distance z from the wall, we show that the relaxation dynamics of the particles close to the wall is much slower than the one for particles far away from the wall. For small z the typical relaxation time for F_s(q,z,t) increases like exp(Delta/(z-z_p)), where Delta and z_p are constants. We use the location of the crossover from this law to the bulk behavior to define a first length scale tilde{z}. A differe…
What is a physical measure of spatial inhomogeneity comparable to the mathematical approach?
1999
A linear transformation f(S) of configurational entropy with length scale dependent coefficients as a measure of spatial inhomogeneity is considered. When a final pattern is formed with periodically repeated initial arrangement of point objects the value of the measure is conserved. This property allows for computation of the measure at every length scale. Its remarkable sensitivity to the deviation (per cell) from a possible maximally uniform object distribution for the length scale considered is comparable to behaviour of strictly mathematical measure h introduced by Garncarek et al. in [2]. Computer generated object distributions reveal a correlation between the two measures at a given l…