On the `mosaic' picture of liquids and glasses

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the 'mosaic' model of liquids and glasses, proposing a new information-theoretic approach to understanding their structure and configurational entropy, linking particle arrangements to information compression.

Contribution

It introduces a precise, information-based framework for describing the structure of supercooled liquids and glasses, connecting configurational entropy with data compression techniques.

Findings

The mosaic model is elusive and difficult to define precisely.

Configurational entropy can be understood through data compression methods.

Solid structures have low information content and increase in complexity when broken.

Abstract

Supercooled liquids are sometimes described as being composed of a mosaic of patches that may be listed in a `library', each one having some form of non-periodic order. Looking closer, one finds this construction elusive. In attempting to give the notion of mosaic a precise sense, we find that we are inevitably led to the construction of a procedure for compressing the information in the particle configuration, essentially the same as that used for texts. The amount of optimally stored information directly defines the configurational entropy. A solid, in this view, is a particle arrangement described by a low amount of information, that can only flow by breaking into uncorrelated pieces, thus increasing its complexity.