Abstract
Cooperative rearranging regions are small patches of molecules that are essential to understanding the physics of glass-forming liquids. Researchers present a theory to characterize the shape of these regions and how the shape changes with temperature.
Highlights
Developing a theory of the glass transition remains one of the most fundamental challenges of statistical physics and condensed matter
The existence of two different static length scales governing the physics of supercooled liquids, ξPS and ξ⊥, is a major fact to take into account in understanding the outcomes of simulations and experiments in glass-forming liquids, in particular when probing static correlations
We show that amorphous interfaces are rough in three dimensions and we obtain the scaling with the configurational entropy of the length scale over which they wander
Summary
Developing a theory of the glass transition remains one of the most fundamental challenges of statistical physics and condensed matter. Since the loss term scales as the surface, whereas the gain term scales as the volume, the former cannot counterbalance the latter and the drop in the overlap field is always favorable Understanding how this takes place and how the resulting amorphous interfaces fluctuate is one of the main aims of this work. Note that in a supercooled liquid there is no quenched disorder: it is the configuration from which the system has to escape in order to flow that plays the role of C, i.e., of self-induced disorder As it is known for random manifolds in random environments, disorder leads to a huge enhancement of the wandering of the interface, so large that thermal fluctuations become completely irrelevant.
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