Cooling-rate effects in a model of (ideal?) glass

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to explore how different cooling rates affect the transition to glassy or crystalline states in a 3D Ising model with four-spin interactions, revealing an ideal glass transition and the impact of heterogeneity.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of an ideal glass transition in a 3D Ising model with four-spin interactions and analyzes how cooling rates influence the final state, including heterogeneity effects.

Findings

Slow cooling leads to crystalline states.

Fast cooling results in glassy states.

The model exhibits an ideal glass transition at low cooling rates.

Abstract

Using Monte Carlo simulations we study cooling-rate effects in a three-dimensional Ising model with four-spin interaction. During coarsening, this model develops growing energy barriers which at low temperature lead to very slow dynamics. We show that the characteristic zero-temperature length increases very slowly with the inverse cooling rate, similarly to the behaviour of ordinary glasses. For computationally accessible cooling rates the model undergoes an ideal glassy transition, i.e., the glassy transition for very small cooling rate coincides a thermodynamic singularity. We also study cooling of this model with a certain fraction of spins fixed. Due to such heterogeneous crystalization seeds the final state strongly depends on the cooling rate.Only for sufficiently fast cooling rate does the system end up in a glassy state while slow cooling inevitably leads to a crystal phase.