On the critical behavior of the specific heat in glass-formers

TL;DR

This paper provides numerical evidence that the specific heat and relaxation time of glass-forming liquids diverge at low temperatures, indicating a critical point in the supercooled phase.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a critical point in glass-formers through finite size scaling and divergence of thermodynamic quantities.

Findings

Potential energy density fluctuations occur over large length scales.

Specific heat diverges as a power law at low temperatures.

Relaxation time diverges, indicating critical behavior.

Abstract

We show numeric evidence that, at low enough temperatures, the potential energy density of a glass-forming liquid fluctuates over length scales much larger than the interaction range. We focus on the behavior of translationally invariant quantities. The growing correlation length is unveiled by studying the Finite Size effects. In the thermodynamic limit, the specific heat and the relaxation time diverge as a power law. Both features point towards the existence of a critical point in the metastable supercooled liquid phase.