Critical behaviour of large scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses: a complete theory

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive theory describing large-scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses, linking their behavior to universality classes of disordered systems and proposing a stochastic differential equation framework.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, physically motivated stochastic differential equation to explain large-scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses, connecting them to universality classes of disordered phase endpoints.

Findings

Behavior is in the same universality class as dynamics near a metastable phase endpoint

Proposes a stochastic differential equation model for heterogeneity dynamics

Links glass heterogeneities to Barkhausen noise phenomena

Abstract

In this talk I will present a complete theory for the behaviour of large-scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses. Following the work arXiv:1001.1746 I will show that we can write a (physically motivated) simple stochastic differential equation that is potentially able to explain the behaviour of large scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses. It turns out that this behaviour is in the same universality class of the dynamics near the endpoint of a metastable phase in a disordered system, as far as reparametrization invariant quantities are concerned. Therefore Large scale dynamical heterogeneities in glasses have many points in contact with the Barkhausen noise. Numerical verifications of this theory have not yet done, but they are quite possible.