Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials

TL;DR

This paper offers a comprehensive theoretical overview of the glass transition, aging, and rheology in amorphous materials, highlighting recent progress, challenges, and the role of simulations in understanding these phenomena.

Contribution

It critically reviews current theoretical approaches to the glass transition and aging in disordered materials, emphasizing their successes, limitations, and open problems.

Findings

Recent progress in understanding spatially heterogeneous dynamics

Assessment of microscopic theories of the glass transition

Identification of key open problems in the field

Abstract

We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with a broad introduction to the field and emphasize its connections with other subjects and its relevance. The important role played by computer simulations to study and understand the dynamics of systems close to the glass transition at the molecular level is spelled out. We review the recent progress on the subject of the spatially heterogeneous dynamics that characterizes structural relaxation in materials with slow dynamics. We then present the main theoretical approaches describing the glass transition in supercooled liquids, focusing on theories that have a microscopic, statistical mechanics basis. We describe both successes and failures, and critically assess the current status of each of these approaches. The physics of aging dynamics in disordered materials and the rheology of soft glassy materials are then discussed, and recent theoretical progress is described. For each section, we give an extensive overview of the most recent advances, but we also describe in some detail the important open problems that, we believe, will occupy a central place in this field in the coming years.