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

A new thermodynamic phase resulting from the competition between a commensurate potential and disorder in interacting fermionic or bosonic systems is predicted. It requires interactions of finite extent. This phase, intermediate between the Mott insulator and the Anderson insulator, is both incompressible and has no gap in the conductivity. The corresponding phase is also predicted for commensurate classical elastic systems in presence of correlated disorder.

At low temperatures the dynamical degrees of freedom in amorphous solids are tunnelling two-level systems (TLSs). Concentrating on these degrees of freedom, and taking into account disorder and TLS-TLS interactions, we obtain a "TLS-glass", described by the random field Ising model with random $1/r^3$ interactions. In this paper we perform a self consistent mean field calculation, previously used to study the electron-glass (EG) model [A.~Amir {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. B {\bf ...

We develop a theory of amorphous interfaces in glass-forming liquids. We show that the statistical properties of these surfaces, which separate regions characterized by different amorphous arrangements of particles, coincide with the ones of domain walls in the random field Ising model. A major consequence of our results is that super-cooled liquids are characterized by two different static lengths: the point-to-set $\xi_{PS}$ which is a measure of the spatial extent of coope...

What does the equilibrium atomic, molecular or spin configuration of a glass phase look like? Is there only one unique equilibrium configuration or are there infinitely many configurations of equal energy? The processes and mechanisms governing the path towards equilibrium, i.e. the dynamics of glassy systems, provide insights to these questions. Here we discuss the intrinsic dynamics of different glassy magnets: of spin-glasses, frustrated ferromagnets, superspin-glasses and...

Recently extended precise numerical methods and droplet scaling arguments allow for a coherent picture of the glassy states of two-dimensional Ising spin glasses to be assembled. The length scale at which entropy becomes important and produces "chaos", the extreme sensitivity of the state to temperature, is found to depend on the type of randomness. For the $\pm J$ model this length scale dominates the low-temperature specific heat. Although there is a type of universality, s...

We show that a family of disordered systems with non-relaxational dynamics may exhibit ``glassy'' behavior at nonzero temperature, although such a behavior appears to be ruled out by a face-value application of mean-field theory. Nevertheless, the roots of this behavior can be understood within mean-field theory itself, properly interpreted. Finite systems belonging to this family have a dynamical regime with a self-similar pattern of alternating periods of fast motion and tr...

We study the glass formation in two- and three-dimensional Ising and Heisenberg spin systems subject to competing interactions and uniaxial anisotropy with a mean-field approach. In three dimensions, for sufficiently strong anisotropy the systems always modulates in a striped phase. Below a critical strength of the anisotropy, a glassy phase exists in a finite range of temperature, and it becomes more stable as the system becomes more isotropic. In two dimension the criticali...

We present a computer simulation study of a disordered two-dimensional system of localized interacting electrons at thermal equilibrium. It is shown that the configuration of occupied sites within the Coulomb gap persistently changes at temperatures much less than the gap width. This is accompanied by large time dependent fluctuations of the site energies. The observed thermal equilibration at low temperatures suggests a possible glass transition only at T=0. We interpret the...

We study the competition between interactions and disorder in two dimensions. Whereas a noninteracting system is always Anderson localized by disorder in two dimensions, a pure system can develop a Mott gap for sufficiently strong interactions. Within a simple model, with short-ranged repulsive interactions, we show that, even in the limit of strong interaction, the Mott gap is completely washed out by disorder for an infinite system for dimensions $D\le 2$. The probability o...

While multiple time scales generally arise in the dynamics of disordered systems, we find multiple time scales in absence of disorder, in a simple model with hard local constraints. The dynamics of the model, which consists of local collective rearrangements of various scales, is not determined by the smallest scale but by a length $l^*$ that grows at low energies. In real space we find a hierarchy of fast and slow regions: each slow region is geometrically insulated from all...