2017/04/30 by Ludovic Berthier, Patrick Charbonneau, Daniele Coslovich +3
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1706860114
published as PNAS 114, 11356-11361 (2017) · 4+23 pages, 3+12 figures; v2: final version, with various changes made. Data relevant to this work can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.7924/G8ZG6Q9T
arxiv created 2017/11/07 · arxiv updated 2017/11/08
Liquids relax extremely slowly upon approaching the glass state. One explanation is that an entropy crisis, due to the rarefaction of available states, makes it increasingly arduous to reach equilibrium in that regime. Validating this scenario is challenging, because experiments offer limited resolution, while numerical studies lag more than eight orders of magnitude behind experimentally-relevant timescales. In this work we not only close the colossal gap between experiments and simulations but manage to create in-silico configurations that have no experimental analog yet. Deploying a range of computational tools, we obtain four estimates of their configurational entropy. These measurements consistently confirm that the steep entropy decrease observed in experiments is also found in simulations, even beyond the experimental glass transition. Our numerical results thus extend the new observational window into the physics of glasses and reinforce the relevance of an entropy crisis for understanding their formation.