Self generated randomness, defect wandering and viscous flow in stripe glasses

We consider the approach describing glass formation in liquids as a progressive trapping in an exponentially large number of metastable states. To go beyond the mean-field setting, we provide a real-space renormalization group (RG) analysis of the associated replica free-energy functional. The present approximation yields in finite dimensions an ideal glass transition similar to that found in mean field. However, we find that along the RG flow the properties associated with m...

We describe our perspective on the Structural Glass Transition (SGT) problem built on the premise that a viable theory must provide a consistent picture of the dynamics and statics, which are manifested by large increase in shear viscosity and thermodynamic anamolies respectively. For the static and dynamic description to be consistent we discovered, using a density functional description without explicit inclusion of quenched random interactions and a mean-field theory, that...

A largely descriptive survey is given of the ordered phases of doped antiferromagnets, and of the long wavelength properties that can be derived from an order-parameter theory. In particular, we show that the competition between the long-range Coulomb repulsion and the strong short-distance tendency of doped holes to coalesce into regions of supressed antiferromagnetism leads to a variety of self-organized charge structures on intermediate length scales, of which ``stripes'' ...

We give evidence of a clear structural signature of the glass transition, in terms of a static correlation length with the same dependence on the system size which is typical of critical phenomena. Our approach is to introduce an external, static perturbation to extract the structural information from the system's response. In particular, we consider the transformation behavior of the local minima of the underlying potential energy landscape (inherent structures), under a sta...

The richness of the mean-field solution of simple glasses leaves many of its features challenging to interpret. A minimal model that illuminates glass physics the same way the random energy model clarifies spin glass behavior would therefore be beneficial. Here, we propose such a real-space model that is amenable to infinite-dimensional analysis and is exactly solvable at high and low densities in finite dimension. By joining analysis with numerical simulations, we uncover ge...

In this talk I present some of the recent theoretical results that have been obtained on glassy systems like spin glasses or structural glasses. The physical principles at the basis of the theory are explained in a simple language (without using replicas) and the results are compared with large scale numerical simulations. Finally we introduce the generalized fluctuation dissipation relation that can be directly tested in experiments with the present day technology.

We discuss the slow, nonequilibrium, dynamics of spin glasses in their glassy phase. We briefly review the present theoretical understanding of the spectacular phenomena observed in experiments and describe new numerical results obtained in the first large-scale simulation of the nonequilibrium dynamics of the three dimensional Heisenberg spin glass.

We review several models of glassy systems where the randomness is self generated, i.e. already an infinitesimal amount of disorder is sufficient to cause a transition to a non-ergodic, glassy state. We discuss the application of the replica formalism developed for the spin glass systems to study the glass transition in uniformly frustrated many-body systems. Here a localization in configuration space emerges leading to an entropy crisis of the system. Using a combination of ...

In this paper we consider in detail the properties of dynamical heterogeneity in lattice glass models (LGMs). LGMs are lattice models whose dynamical rules are based on thermodynamic, as opposed to purely kinetic, considerations. We devise a LGM that is not prone to crystallization and displays properties of a fragile glass-forming liquid. Particle motion in this model tends to be locally anisotropic on intermediate time scales even though the rules governing the model are is...

In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or complexity). These results are at the basis of some analytic computations of the thermodynamic glass transition and of the properties below the phase transition point.