ON A DYNAMICAL MODEL OF GLASSES

TL;DR

This paper presents a dynamical model of glasses where particles are trapped in evolving potential wells, revealing non-stationary dynamics and characteristic behaviors like stretched correlations and Vogel-Fulcher-like relaxation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, evolving potential well model capturing key glass transition features and non-stationary dynamics.

Findings

Correlation functions exhibit stretching at low temperatures.

Terminal relaxation times follow Vogel-Fulcher-like behavior.

The model predicts non-normalisable equilibrium distributions at the transition.

Abstract

We analyze a simple dynamical model of glasses, based on the idea that each particle is trapped in a local potential well, which itself evolves due to hopping of neighbouring particles. The glass transition is signalled by the fact that the equilibrium distribution ceases to be normalisable, and dynamics becomes non-stationary. We generically find stretching of the correlation function at low temperatures and a Vogel-Fulcher like behaviour of the terminal time.