The Random First-Order Transition Theory of Glasses: a critical assessment

By Giulio Biroli, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. 2009

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to summarise the basic arguments and the intuition bolstering the RFOT picture for glasses, based on a finite dimensional extension of mean-field models with an exponentially large number of metastable states. We review the pros and cons that support or undermine the theory, and the directions, both theoretical and experimental, where progress is needed to ascertain the status of RFOT. We elaborate in particular on the notions of mosaic state and point-to-set correlations, and insist on the importance of fluctuations in finite dimensions, that significantly blur the expected cross-over between a Mode-Coupling like regime and the mosaic, activated regime. We discuss in detail the fundamental predictions of RFOT, in particular the possibility to force a small enough system into an ideal glass state, and present several new ones, concerning aging properties or non-linear rheology. Finally, we compare RFOT to other recent theories, including elastic models, Frustration Limited Domains or Kinetically Constrained models.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8be05837ece4339bf567d2f8a1046fb82f561cc

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In Condensed Matter Physics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Excitations Are Localized and Relaxation Is Hierarchical in Glass-Forming Liquids (2011, unknown): “Perhaps the foremost criticism is that no viable procedure has existed from which localized excitations could be seen as emergent properties of atomistic dynamics [16, 17].”
Statistical physics of inference: thresholds and algorithms (2015, background): “[24] Giulio Biroli and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud.”
Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials (2010, background): “Reviews dedicated to different aspects of RFOT theory have appeared recently (Lubchenko and Wolynes, 2007; Götze, 2008; Cavagna, 2009; Biroli and Bouchaud, 2009; Mézard and Parisi, 2010).”
Non-monotonic temperature evolution of dynamic correlations in glass-forming liquids (2011, background): “Thus, even at the theoretical level, the physics around T c remains ‘mysterious&rsquo”