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Updated: Jun 8, 2026

Cooling Rate Dependent Ellipsometry Measurements to Determine the Dynamics of Thin Glassy Films
Published on: January 26, 2016
Mode-coupling theory as a mean-field description of the glass transition
Atsushi Ikeda1, Kunimasa Miyazaki
1Institute of Physics, University of Tsukuba, Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8571, Japan.
Abstract:
Mode-coupling theory (MCT) is conjectured to be a mean-field description of dynamics of the structural glass transition and the replica theory to be its thermodynamic counterpart. However, the relationship between the two theories remains controversial and a quantitative comparison is lacking. In this Letter, we investigate MCT for monatomic hard-sphere fluids at arbitrary dimensions above three and compare the results with replica theory. We find grave discrepancies between the predictions of two theories. While MCT describes the nonergodic parameter quantitatively better than the replica theory in three dimensions, it predicts a completely different dimension dependence of the dynamical transition point. We find it to be due to the pathological behavior of the nonergodic parameters derived from MCT, which exhibit negative tails in real space at high dimensions.
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