A structural approach to relaxation in glassy liquids

Understand

When a liquid freezes, a change in the local atomic structure marks the transition to the crystal.

• When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, however, no noticeable structural change marks the glass transition.
• Indeed, characteristic features of glassy dynamics that appear below an onset temperature, T_0, are qualitatively captured by mean field theory, which assumes uniform local structure at all temperatures.
• Even studies of more realistic systems have found only weak correlations between structure and dynamics.