Supercooled liquids and the glass transition

Pablo G. Debenedetti () and Frank H. Stillinger
Additional contact information
Pablo G. Debenedetti: Princeton University
Frank H. Stillinger: Princeton Materials Institute, Princeton University

Nature, 2001, vol. 410, issue 6825, 259-267

Abstract: Abstract Glasses are disordered materials that lack the periodicity of crystals but behave mechanically like solids. The most common way of making a glass is by cooling a viscous liquid fast enough to avoid crystallization. Although this route to the vitreous state — supercooling — has been known for millennia, the molecular processes by which liquids acquire amorphous rigidity upon cooling are not fully understood. Here we discuss current theoretical knowledge of the manner in which intermolecular forces give rise to complex behaviour in supercooled liquids and glasses. An intriguing aspect of this behaviour is the apparent connection between dynamics and thermodynamics. The multidimensional potential energy surface as a function of particle coordinates (the energy landscape) offers a convenient viewpoint for the analysis and interpretation of supercooling and glass-formation phenomena. That much of this analysis is at present largely qualitative reflects the fact that precise computations of how viscous liquids sample their landscape have become possible only recently.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35065704 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:410:y:2001:i:6825:d:10.1038_35065704

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35065704

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().