CECAM - Glasses meet Glasses: reconciling views

Scientific background The understanding of glasses and the nature of the glass transition remains one of the greatest challenges in condensed matter science. It is not surprising, therefore, that many different communities have studied the problem, coming from engineering, condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics. While there have been many conferences addressing one approach or the other, there have been very few attempts at bringing together the leading practitioners from all these areas in order to establish a real dialogue. Glasses meet glasses intends to do just that. We propose to invite theoreticians from all these fields in an environment where discussion can take place, providing a much needed exchange of ideas at a time when many fields have progressed on their own. Selected experimentalists are also invited to contribute to the discussion. Indeed, important achievements [1] have been realized due, in part, to the increased power of computational resources. Both Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and ab initio methods provide a good basis to describe relaxation and kinetic phenomena [2], structures of glass-forming liquids [3], vibrational and structural properties of amorphous materials [4]. On the other hand, much of the behaviour of glasses is independent of the details of the inter-atomic forces and approaches have been proposed that rely either on hydrodynamics [5], or bond distance constraints [6], lattice Hamiltonians [7], kinetic constrained models [8] with sometimes restricted areas of applicability such as the high temperature/low viscosity regimes or the fully connected glass network at low temperature. While fragile glass forming liquids with no directive (covalent) interactions have been studied in the context of glass transition for some time, simulations on typical network glasses such as oxide or chalcogenide glasses have received attention only recently [9]. Work related to glass transition is regularly reported in high impact journals and the description in terms of the (complex) underlying energy landscape [10] and the way connectedness of the network influences the nature of dynamics is becoming more and more accurate. Numerous specific conferences on glasses, glass transition or non-crystalline materials have taken place over the years with isolated communities that rarely exchange ideas, concepts and related experiments. While progress has been quite spectacular, particularly in the last few years, many questions remain unanswered with some recently developed concepts appearing almost incompatible with each other. We therefore believe that there is a need for a suitably designed CECAM workshop that can offer the opportunity to make an assessment of the current theoretical developments in this field from across the board, along with recent experiments performed in this context (Hyper-Raman, isotopic substitution techniques and inelastic neutron scattering, modulated differential scanning calorimetry,.).

Glasses meet Glasses: reconciling views

CECAM 46 allée d'Italie 69007 Lyon France

Organisers

References