Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9530, USA.
Rep Prog Phys. 2014 Apr;77(4):042501. doi: 10.1088/0034-4885/77/4/042501. Epub 2014 Mar 19.
This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the most intriguing features of glassy behavior, but are too unrealistic to provide bases for predictive theories. As illustrations of what I mean, the first part of this article is devoted to brief summaries of imaginative, sensible, but disparate and often contradictory ideas for solving glass problems. Almost all of these ideas remain alive today, with their own enthusiastic advocates. I then describe numerical simulations, mostly by H Tanaka and coworkers, in which it appears that very simple, polydisperse systems of hard disks and spheres develop long range, Ising-like, bond-orientational order as they approach glass transitions. Finally, I summarize my recent proposal that topologically ordered clusters of particles, in disordered environments, tend to become aligned with each other as if they were two-state systems, and thus produce the observed Ising-like behavior. Neither Tanaka's results nor my proposed interpretation of them fit comfortably within any of the currently popular glass theories.
这篇关键问题综述呼吁人们关注更简单、更现实的玻璃形成流体模型。在我看来，我们经常被复杂的数学模型误导，这些模型虽然能很好地捕捉到玻璃态行为中最有趣的一些特征，但却不切实际，无法为预测理论提供基础。为了说明我的意思，本文的第一部分简要总结了一些富有想象力、合理但不同且常常相互矛盾的解决玻璃问题的思路。几乎所有这些思路至今仍有其拥趸。然后，我描述了数值模拟，主要是 H. Tanaka 和他的同事们的模拟，在这些模拟中，似乎非常简单、多分散的硬磁盘和球体系统在接近玻璃转变时会发展出长程的、类似于伊辛的键取向有序。最后，我总结了我最近的一个提议，即在无序环境中，粒子拓扑有序簇倾向于彼此对齐，就像二态系统一样，从而产生观察到的类似于伊辛的行为。无论是 Tanaka 的结果还是我对它们的解释都不太符合目前流行的任何一种玻璃理论。
