Search for a thermodynamic basis for the glass transition

Abstract

We present the results of two numerical studies of the glass transition. In the first, we show that the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff density functional for hard spheres has, at large enough packing fraction, a large number of metastable minima corresponding to frozen, inhomogeneous, but not periodic or quasiperiodic density configurations. These minima are mean-field glassy states. The second work is a molecular dynamics simulation of Lennard-Jones mixtures, which finds a complete absence of spatial scale-dependence in the growth of relaxation times near the glass transition. This is evidence against the interpretation of the glass transition as a continous phase transition.