Excitation Chains at the Glass Transition

Details Excitation Chains at the Glass Transition Excitation Chains at the Glass Transition

2006-06-26

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0606669v1

Physics

Condensed Matter

Statistical Mechanics

4 pages, no figures

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.115704

The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, {\it via} a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations between dynamic and thermodynamic properties of glass-forming liquids. I argue here that critically large excitation chains play a role roughly analogous to that played by critical clusters in the droplet model of vapor condensation. The chains necessarily induce spatial heterogeneities in the equilibrium states of glassy systems; and these heterogeneities may be related to stretched-exponential relaxation. Unlike a first-order condensation point in a vapor, the glass transition is not a conventional phase transformation, and may not be a thermodynamic transition at all.

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