In the introductory chapter we focused on the supercooled and deeply supercooled branches in Fig. 1.1, as a way to properly introduce the phenomenon of the glassy slowdown, the fundamental notion ofmetastable glassy state, and lay the groundwork for the discussion of the Random First Order Theory of the glassy slowdown which this thesis is based upon. This discussion takes place in the present ...

Supercooled first order phase transitions are typical of theories where conformal symmetry is predominantly spontaneously broken. In these the fate flat scalar direction highly sensitive to size and scaling dimension explicit breaking deformations. For a given deformation, coupling must lie in particular region realize supercooled transition. We identify supercooling window weakly coupled deriv...

Recent discussions in the literature have questioned the ability of electromagnetic exposure to inhibit ice crystal formation in supercooled water. Here we note that strong electric fields are able to disrupt the surface boundary layer of inert air on the surface of materials, promoting higher rates of heat transport. We also note that most biological tissues contain ferromagnetic materials, bo...

Generation of equilibrium configurations is the major obstacle for numerical investigation of the slow dynamics in supercooled liquid states. The parallel tempering (PT) technique, originally proposed for the numerical equilibration of discrete spin-glass model configurations, has recently been applied in the study of supercooled structural glasses. We present an investigation of the ability of...

The ability of the rapid-capacitive discharge approach to access optimal viscosity ranges in metallic glasses for thermoplastic processing is explored. Using high-speed thermal imaging, the heating uniformity and stability against crystallization of Zr35Ti30Cu7.5Be27.5 metallic glass heated deeply into the supercooled region is investigated. The method enables homogeneous volumetric heating of ...

A bulk metallic glass forming alloy is subjected to shear flow in its supercooled state by compression of a short rod to produce a flat disk. The resulting material exhibits enhanced crystallization kinetics during isothermal annealing as reflected in the decrease of the crystallization time relative to the nondeformed case. The transition from quiescent to shear-accelerated crystallization is ...

Experimental studies that follow behavior of single probes embedded in heterogeneous systems are increasingly common. The presence of probes may perturb the system, and such perturbations may or may not affect interpretation of host behavior from the probe observables typically measured. In this study, the manifestations of potential probe-induced changes to host dynamics in supercooled liquids...

Contrary to the historical data, several recent experiments indicate that the surface tension of supercooled water follows a smooth extrapolation of the IAPWS equation in the supercooled regime. It can be seen, however, that a small deviation from the IAPWS equation is present in the recent experimental measurements. It is shown with simulations using the WAIL water potential that the small dev...

We use a recently derived reformulation of the diffusion constant (Stillinger and Debenedetti 2005 J. Phys. Chem. B 109 6604) to investigate heterogeneous dynamics and non-Gaussian diffusion in a binary Lennard-Jones mixture. Our work focuses on the joint probability distribution of particles with velocity v0 at time t = 0 and eventual displacement x at time t = t . We show that this distributi...