Collective modes and thermodynamics of the liquid state

Understand

Strongly interacting, dynamically disordered and with no small parameter, liquids took a theoretical status between gases and solids.

• We review different approaches to liquids and propose that liquids do not need classifying in terms of their proximity to gases and solids.
• Instead, they are a unique system in their own class with a notably mixed dynamical state in contrast to pure dynamical states of solids and gases.
• We start with explaining how the first-principles approach to liquids is an intractable, exponentially complex problem of coupled non-linear oscillators with bifurcations.