Self-Organized Criticality Below The Glass Transition

TL;DR

This paper provides evidence that glassy systems below the glass transition exhibit self-organized criticality, with power-law distributed clusters of cooperatively jumping particles, indicating a freezing of critical behavior across all sub-transition temperatures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that self-organized criticality persists below the glass transition in glassy systems, a novel insight into their dynamical behavior.

Findings

Clusters of jumping particles are string-like.

Cluster sizes follow a power-law distribution below T_c.

Critical behavior appears to freeze below the glass transition.

Abstract

We obtain evidence that the dynamics of glassy systems below the glass transition is characterized by self-organized criticality. Using molecular dynamics simulations of a model glass-former we identify clusters of cooperatively jumping particles. We find string-like clusters whose size is power-law distributed not only close to T_c but for ALL temperatures below T_c, indicating self-organized criticality which we interpret as a freezing in of critical behavior.