Local energy approach to the dynamic glass transition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a phenomenological model for the dynamic glass transition using local energies and a self-consistent energy distribution, capturing key glassy dynamics features like two-step relaxation and aging.

Contribution

It presents a novel mean-field model that incorporates local energies and a self-consistent energy distribution to describe the glass transition.

Findings

Model reproduces two-step relaxation of energy autocorrelation.

Aging scaling governed by global energy evolution.

Linear violations of fluctuation-dissipation relation observed.

Abstract

We propose a new class of phenomenological models for dynamic glass transitions. The system consists of an ensemble of mesoscopic regions to which local energies are allocated. At each time step, a region is randomly chosen and a new local energy is drawn from a distribution that self-consistently depends on the global energy of the system. Then, the transition is accepted or not according to the Metropolis rule. Within this scheme, we model an energy threshold leading to a mode-coupling glass transition as in the p-spin model. The glassy dynamics is characterized by a two-step relaxation of the energy autocorrelation function. The aging scaling is fully determined by the evolution of the global energy and linear violations of the fluctuation dissipation relation are found for observables uncorrelated with the energies. Interestingly, our mean-field approach has a natural extension to finite dimension, that we briefly discuss.