Glasses articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article |

    As amorphous solids, glasses and gels are similar, but the origins of their different elastic properties are unclear. Simulations now suggest differing free-energy-minimizing pathways: structural ordering for glasses and interface reduction for gels.

    • Yinqiao Wang
    • , Michio Tateno
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • News & Views |

    Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.

    • Beatrice Ruta
    •  & Daniele Cangialosi

  • News & Views |

    Disordered systems that are far from equilibrium relax slowly towards their equilibrium. Now, we learn that the irreversible plastic deformations that form the wrinkles of a crumpled sheet result in a complex energy landscape that ages logarithmically.

    • Kari Dalnoki-Veress

  • Article |

    Many complex systems relax slowly towards equilibrium after a perturbation, without ever reaching it. Experiments with crumpled sheets now show that these relaxations involve intermittent avalanches of localized instabilities, whose slow-down leads to logarithmic aging.

    • Dor Shohat
    • , Yaniv Friedman
    •  & Yoav Lahini

  • News & Views |

    An experimental approach enables the observation of the microscopic details of the relaxation of a highly equilibrated glass back to the liquid phase in real time. This points to a scenario where devitrification proceeds via localized seeds separated by macroscopic length scales.

    • Federico Caporaletti

  • Article |

    The yielding transition in concentrated colloidal suspensions and emulsions lacks a universal description. A unified state diagram is now shown to underlie yielding for these materials, analogous to the van der Waals phase diagram for non-ideal gases.

    • Stefano Aime
    • , Domenico Truzzolillo
    •  & Luca Cipelletti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visualizing dynamical changes in glassy systems is challenging because of the time and length scales involved. Now, atomic force microscopy is shown to be a viable method for obtaining a spatio-temporal description of the relaxation of a glass.

    • Marta Ruiz-Ruiz
    • , Ana Vila-Costa
    •  & Javier Rodriguez-Viejo

  • Article |

    Glasses relax internally even when their structure is frozen. Observations of a two-dimensional glass former now show that although structure relaxation freezes with the glass transition, non-constrained bonds survive; this accounts for persisting internal relaxation.

    • Yanshuang Chen
    • , Zefang Ye
    •  & Peng Tan

  • Article |

    Large-system molecular dynamics simulations of films of glass-forming polymers reveal spatially long-range tails of interface-driven gradients of the glass transition temperature, suggestive of a combined local caging and long-range collective elasticity origin of relaxation and vitrification in glass-forming liquids.

    • Asieh Ghanekarade
    • , Anh D. Phan
    •  & David S. Simmons

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Lindemann criterion states that crystals melt when thermal vibrations overcome binding forces. It is now found that this picture does not hold for glasses, and that there is a universal relationship between glass temperature and thermal expansion.

    • Peter Lunkenheimer
    • , Alois Loidl
    •  & Konrad Samwer

  • Article |

    The transition from a glassy to a liquid phase is normally assumed to take place cooperatively across the whole material. But now, experiments show that, under certain conditions, isolated regions of liquid can form in the glassy matrix first.

    • Ana Vila-Costa
    • , Marta Gonzalez-Silveira
    •  & Javier Rodriguez-Viejo

  • Editorial |

    Glass, now celebrated with a dedicated International Year, continues to fascinate.

  • News & Views |

    Two-dimensional model glasses exhibit characteristics in their low-frequency vibrational density of states that can be traced to the quasilocalized dynamics of string-like objects. This finding provides an explanation for a universal feature of glasses known as the boson peak.

    • Lothar Wondraczek

  • Article |

    The relation between physical properties and structure in amorphous materials is poorly understood. Simulations now show that vibrations of string-like dynamical defects likely govern the low-temperature dynamics in these systems.

    • Yuan-Chao Hu
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • Letter |

    The response of amorphous solids to external stress is not very well understood. A study now shows that certain glasses, upon decreasing temperature, undergo a phase transition characterized by diverging nonlinear elastic moduli.

    • Giulio Biroli
    •  & Pierfrancesco Urbani

  • News & Views |

    The dynamics of a viscous liquid undergo a dramatic slowdown when it is cooled to form a solid glass. Recognizing the structural changes across such a transition remains a major challenge. Machine-learning methods, similar to those Facebook uses to recognize groups of friends, have now been applied to this problem.

    • Michele Ceriotti
    •  & Vincenzo Vitelli

  • Letter |

    The relation between structure and dynamics in glasses is not fully understood. A new approach based on machine learning now reveals a correlation between softness—a structural property—and glassy dynamics.

    • S. S. Schoenholz
    • , E. D. Cubuk
    •  & A. J. Liu

  • Article |

    Cells moving in a tissue undergo a rigidity transition resembling that of active particles jamming at a critical density—but the tissue density stays constant. A new type of rigidity transition implicates the physical properties of the cells.

    • Dapeng Bi
    • , J. H. Lopez
    •  & M. Lisa Manning

  • News & Views |

    The jury's still out on how glasses and other disordered materials form. However, a new framework suggests that we can understand their mechanical properties without this information, by using the physics of jamming.

    • Giulio Biroli

  • Letter |

    Jammed systems are typically thought of as being amorphous. Simulations of packings with varying disorder reveal a crossover from crystalline behaviour, which suggests the physics of jamming also applies to highly ordered systems—providing a new framework for understanding amorphous solids.

    • Carl P. Goodrich
    • , Andrea J. Liu
    •  & Sidney R. Nagel

  • Article |

    Active materials, such as motile cells and self-propelled colloids, exhibit glassy effects, but little is known about the glass transition far from equilibrium. A study of model glasses subject to non-thermal driving and dissipation reveals signatures of dynamic arrest that can be understood in terms of an effective equilibrium description.

    • Ludovic Berthier
    •  & Jorge Kurchan

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