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Published on: January 26, 2016
Statistical mechanics of the glass transition in one-component liquids with an anisotropic potential
Valery Ilyin1, Edan Lerner, Ting-Shek Lo
1Department of Chemical Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Abstract:
We study a recently introduced model of one-component glass-forming liquids whose constituents interact with an anisotropic potential. This system is interesting per se and as a model of liquids such as glycerol (interacting via hydrogen bonds) which are excellent glass formers. We work out the statistical mechanics of this system, encoding the liquid and glass disorder using appropriate quasiparticles (36 of them). The theory provides a full explanation of the glass transition phenomenology, including the identification of a diverging length scale and a relation between the structural changes and the diverging relaxation times.
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