The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, via a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations between dynamic and thermodynamic properties of glass-forming liquids. I argue here that critically large excitation chains play a role roughly analogous to that pl...

We present molecular-dynamics simulations of self-diffusion in Al. In order to facilitate the description of elastic and vibrational properties as well as vacancy migration, an embedded-atom method potential was used in the simulations. This potential was specifically designed to reproduce the T = 0 K equation of state of Al obtained by ab initio total-energy calculations. We show that the temp...

This article is devoted to the explanation of the onset of localization and the formation of shear bands in high strain-rate plasticity of metals. We employ the Arrhenius constitutive model and show Hadamard instability for the linearized problem. For the nonlinear model, using an asymptotic procedure motivated by the theory of relaxation and the Chapman-Enskog expansion, we derive an effective...

An unshunted Josephson tunnel junction switching out of its zero-voltage state is a model system for thermal activation out of a metastable state. For small-capacitance low-critical-current junctions, this thermal activation process follows a generalized Arrhenius law involving dissipation directly in its exponent. This escape over a dissipation barrier can be computed exactly for a junction co...

This paper draws attention to selected experiments on enzyme-catalyzed reactions that show convex Arrhenius plots, which are very rare, and points out that Tolman's interpretation of the activation energy places a fundamental model-independent constraint on any detailed explanation of these reactions. The analysis presented here shows that in such systems, the rate coefficient as a function of ...