The glass transition in sugars is important for several reasons. First, sugar glasses are very effective materials for cryopreservation and anhydrobiosis. Second, biochemists commonly use sugars to suspend biomaterials in a glassy matrix for spectroscopic studies. Third, the glass transition in sugars is important in the food industry. The texture of candies or cookies mainly depends on the gla...

We study the microstructural glass transition in diblock-copolymer melts using a thermodynamic replica approach. Our approach performs an expansion in terms of the natural smallness parameter--the inverse of the scaled degree of polymerization N--which allows us to systematically study the approach to mean-field behavior as the degree of polymerization increases. We find that in the limit of in...

We report a molecular dynamics investigation of the glass transition temperature in selenium at pressures ranging from 0 to 6 GPa as a function of the quench rate, Qr . For moderate pressures the specific volume of the glass depends strongly on the quench rate, whereas the specific enthalpy varies only little. We find for both volume and energy a linear dependence on the quench-rate-dependent g...

We study concentrated binary colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition as the volume fraction f of particles is increased. We use confocal microscopy to directly observe particle motion within dense samples with f ranging from 0.4 to 0.7. Our binary mixtures have a particle diameter ratio dS/dL 1⁄4 1/1.3 and particle number ratio NS/NL 1⁄4 1.56, which are chosen to inhi...

We discuss the behavior of the fully frustrated hypercubic cell in the infinite dimensional mean-field limit. In the Ising case the system undergoes a glass transition, well described by the random orthogonal model. Under the glass temperature aging effects show clearly. In the XY case there is no sign of a phase transition, and the system is always a paramagnet.

Hybrid glasses connect the emerging field of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with the glass formation, amorphization and melting processes of these chemically versatile systems. Though inorganic zeolites collapse around the glass transition and melt at higher temperatures, the relationship between amorphization and melting has so far not been investigated. Here we show how heating MOFs of zeoli...

Glass transitions were observed in thin films of poly(2-vinyl pyridine) (P2VP) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) using a scanning nanocalorimetry technique which has both high sensitivity (10−9 J/K) and high scan rates (104–105 K/s). Samples were deposited by the spin-cast method. The thickness of samples was 100–400 nm. Glass transition temperature, obtained by nanocalorimetry, is shifted t...