Zhang G, Stillinger F H, Torquato S
Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, 08540, USA.
Department of Chemistry, Department of Physics, Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, and Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, 08540, USA.
Sci Rep. 2016 Nov 28;6:36963. doi: 10.1038/srep36963.
Rapid cooling of liquids below a certain temperature range can result in a transition to glassy states. The traditional understanding of glasses includes their thermodynamic metastability with respect to crystals. However, here we present specific examples of interactions that eliminate the possibilities of crystalline and quasicrystalline phases, while creating mechanically stable amorphous glasses down to absolute zero temperature. We show that this can be accomplished by introducing a new ideal state of matter called a "perfect glass". A perfect glass represents a soft-interaction analog of the maximally random jammed (MRJ) packings of hard particles. These latter states can be regarded as the epitome of a glass since they are out of equilibrium, maximally disordered, hyperuniform, mechanically rigid with infinite bulk and shear moduli, and can never crystallize due to configuration-space trapping. Our model perfect glass utilizes two-, three-, and four-body soft interactions while simultaneously retaining the salient attributes of the MRJ state. These models constitute a theoretical proof of concept for perfect glasses and broaden our fundamental understanding of glass physics. A novel feature of equilibrium systems of identical particles interacting with the perfect-glass potential at positive temperature is that they have a non-relativistic speed of sound that is infinite.
将液体快速冷却至特定温度范围以下会导致其转变为玻璃态。对玻璃的传统理解包括它们相对于晶体的热力学亚稳性。然而，在此我们展示了一些相互作用的具体例子，这些相互作用消除了结晶相和准晶相的可能性，同时在绝对零度以下创造出机械稳定的非晶玻璃。我们表明，这可以通过引入一种名为“完美玻璃”的新理想物质状态来实现。完美玻璃代表了硬粒子最大随机堵塞（MRJ）堆积的软相互作用类似物。由于这些后者的状态处于非平衡态、最大程度无序、超均匀、具有无限体模量和剪切模量的机械刚性，并且由于构型空间捕获而永远不会结晶，因此可以被视为玻璃的缩影。我们的模型完美玻璃利用二体、三体和四体软相互作用，同时保留了MRJ状态的显著属性。这些模型构成了完美玻璃的理论概念证明，并拓宽了我们对玻璃物理的基本理解。相同粒子在正温度下与完美玻璃势相互作用的平衡系统的一个新特征是它们具有无限的非相对论声速。
