Self-organization with equilibration: a model for the intermediate phase in rigidity percolation

This paper gives an introduction to some of the statistical physics problems which appear in the study of structural glasses. It is a shortened and updated version of a more detailed review paper which has appeared in cond-mat/0005173.

The criticality of self-assembled rigid rods on triangular lattices is investigated using Monte Carlo simulation. We find a continuous transition between an ordered phase, where the rods are oriented along one of the three (equivalent) lattice directions, and a disordered one. We conclude that equilibrium polydispersity of the rod lengths does not affect the critical behavior, as we found that the criticality is the same as that of monodisperse rods on the same lattice, in co...

The entirely orbital self-organized dopant percolative filamentary model describes many counter-intuitive chemical trends in oxide superconductors quantitatively, especially the high superconductive transition temperatures Tc. According to rules previously used successfully for network glasees, the host networks are marginally stable mechanically, and the high Tc's are caused by network softening, which produces large electron-phonon interactions at interlayer dopants for sta...

The percolation behavior of aligned rigid rods of length $k$ ($k$-mers) on two-dimensional triangular lattices has been studied by numerical simulations and finite-size scaling analysis. The $k$-mers, containing $k$ identical units (each one occupying a lattice site), were irreversibly deposited along one of the directions of the lattice. The connectivity analysis was carried out by following the probability $R_{L,k}(p)$ that a lattice composed of $L \times L$ sites percolate...

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.

In this contribution, we investigate the fundamental mechanism of plasticity in a model two-dimensional network glass. The glass is generated by using a Monte Carlo bond-switching algorithm and subjected to athermal simple shear deformation, followed by subsequent unloading at selected deformation states. This enables us to investigate the topological origin of reversible and irreversible atomic-scale rearrangements. It is shown that some events that are triggered during load...

Recent theoretical advances have led to the creation of a unified phase diagram for the thermal glass and athermal jamming transitions. This diagram makes clear that, while related, the mode-coupling---or dynamic---glass transition is distinct from the jamming transition, occurring at a finite temperature and significantly lower density than the jamming transition. Nonetheless, we demonstrate a pre-jamming transition in athermal frictionless spheres which occurs at the same d...

In ordinary solids, material disorder is known to increase the size of the process zone in which stress concentrates at the crack tip, causing a transition from localized to diffuse failure. Here, we report experiments on disordered 2D lattices, derived from frictional particle packings, in which the mean coordination number $\langle z \rangle$ of the underlying network provides a similar control. Our experiments show that tuning the connectivity of the network provides acces...

We study a one parameter family of random graph models that spans a continuum between traditional random graphs of the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi type, where there is no underlying structure, and percolation models, where the possible edges are dictated exactly by a geometry. We find that previously developed theories in the fields of random graphs and percolation have, starting from different directions, covered almost all the models described by our family. In particular, the existe...

Generic intermediate phases with anomalous properties exist over narrow composition ranges adjacent to connectivity transitions. Analysis of both simple classical and complex quantum percolation shows how topological concepts can be used to understand many mysterious properties of high temperature superconductors, including the remarkably similar phase diagrams of La(2-x)SrxCuO4 and C(60+y).