First-order dynamical phase transition in models of glasses: an approach based on ensembles of histories

TL;DR

This paper studies kinetically constrained models of glasses, revealing a first-order dynamical phase transition between active and inactive states through large deviation analysis, linking heterogeneity to phase coexistence.

Contribution

It introduces a large deviation framework to identify and analyze first-order dynamical phase transitions in models of glass formers, supported by analytical and numerical results.

Findings

Identification of a first-order dynamical transition in glass models

Large deviation functions reveal phase coexistence in dynamics

Landau-like theory models dynamical fluctuations effectively

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of kinetically constrained models of glass formers by analysing the statistics of trajectories of the dynamics, or histories, using large deviation function methods. We show that, in general, these models exhibit a first-order dynamical transition between active and inactive dynamical phases. We argue that the dynamical heterogeneities displayed by these systems are a manifestation of dynamical first-order phase coexistence. In particular, we calculate dynamical large deviation functions, both analytically and numerically, for the Fredrickson-Andersen model, the East model, and constrained lattice gas models. We also show how large deviation functions can be obtained from a Landau-like theory for dynamical fluctuations. We discuss possibilities for similar dynamical phase-coexistence behaviour in other systems with heterogeneous dynamics.