Calorimetric glass transition in a mean field theory approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a mean field model for glass-forming liquids that is analytically solvable in any dimension and can be used to simulate thermalization in the glass phase, providing insights into ultra-stable glasses.

Contribution

It introduces a solvable mean field hard-sphere model applicable in any dimension, enabling thermalization in the glass phase and simulating experimental heating and cooling.

Findings

Numerical results agree with analytical predictions.

Model captures key features of ultra-stable glasses.

Simulations reproduce experimental heating and cooling behaviors.

Abstract

The study of the properties of glass-forming liquids is difficult for many reasons. Analytic solutions of mean field models are usually available only for systems embedded in a space with an unphysically high number of spatial dimensions; on the experimental and numerical side, the study of the properties of metastable glassy states requires to thermalize the system in the supercooled liquid phase, where the thermalization time may be extremely large. We consider here an hard-sphere mean field model which is solvable in any number of spatial dimensions; moreover we easily obtain thermalized configurations even in the glass phase. We study the three dimensional version of this model and we perform Monte Carlo simulations which mimic heating and cooling experiments performed on ultra-stable glasses. The numerical findings are in good agreement with the analytical results and qualitatively capture the features of ultra-stable glasses observed in experiments.