Physics (Internal)

"Glass transition: a new kind of critical phenomenon?"

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract: Understanding the glass and jamming transitions is a long standing challenge which is of interest to several fields from statistical
mechanics and soft matter, to material sciences and biophysics.
Are glasses just liquids that have become so viscous that
they cannot flow anymore or the dramatic slowing down of their dynamics
is related to a true underlying phase transition?
Recent experimental results, triggered by new theoretical ideas,
have shown direct evidence that dynamical correlations increase
lowering the temperature, thus giving strong support to this second
hypothesis. Furthermore quantitative and qualitative theoretical
predictions on dynamical correlations have started to be tested
and are helping to prune down different theories which have remained
up to now difficult to confirm or to falsify for lack of precise,
testable predictions. In this talk I shall discuss these new
results focusing in particular our theoretical findings and their
comparison to experiments.