2006/11/30 by Carolina Brito, Matthieu Wyart · 2 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2007/08/l08003
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2007) L08003 · 6 pages, improved version
arxiv created 2007/04/18 · openalex publication_date 2007/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, which was previously accessible only via density functional theory. In our formalism normal modes can easily be defined and computed. In this work we use these tools to analyze the activated transitions between meta-basins, both in the ageing regime deep in the glass phase and near the glass transition. We observe numerically that structural relaxation occurs mostly along a very small number of nearly unstable extended modes. This number decays for denser packing and is significantly lowered as the system undergoes the glass transition. This observation supports the assertion that structural relaxation and marginal modes share common properties. In particular, theoretical results show that these modes extend at least on some length scale l * ∼(ϕ c −ϕ) −1/2 where ϕ c corresponds to the maximum packing fraction, i.e. the jamming transition. This prediction is consistent with very recent numerical observations of dynamical length scales in sheared systems near the jamming threshold, where a similar exponent is found, and with the commonly observed growth of the rearranging regions with compression near the glass transition.