Emergence of rigidity at the structural glass transition: a first principle computation

TL;DR

This paper presents a first-principles computation of the shear modulus in structural glasses, revealing its temperature-dependent behavior and continuous vanishing at the glass transition, based on cloned liquid theory.

Contribution

It introduces a novel first-principles method to calculate the shear modulus of glasses, linking microscopic theory to macroscopic mechanical properties.

Findings

Shear modulus depends strongly on temperature.

Shear modulus vanishes continuously at the glass transition.

Intra-state shear modulus aligns with experimental plateau modulus.

Abstract

We compute the shear modulus of structural glasses from a first principle approach based on the cloned liquid theory. We find that the intra-state shear-modulus, which corresponds to the plateau modulus measured in linear visco-elastic measurements, strongly depends on temperature and vanishes continuously when the temperature is increased beyond the glass temperature.