Zero-temperature glass transition in two dimensions

Abstract

Liquids cooled towards the glass transition temperature transform into amorphous solids that have a wide range of applications. While the nature of this transformation is understood rigorously in the mean-field limit of infinite spatial dimensions, the problem remains wide open in physical dimensions. Nontrivial finite-dimensional fluctuations are hard to control analytically, and experiments fail to provide conclusive evidence regarding the nature of the glass transition. Here, we develop Monte Carlo methods for two-dimensional glass-forming liquids that allow us to access equilibrium states at sufficiently low temperatures to directly probe the glass transition in a regime inaccessible to experiments. We find that the liquid state terminates at a thermodynamic glass transition which occurs at zero temperature and is associated with an entropy crisis and a diverging static correlation length. Our results thus demonstrate that a thermodynamic glass transition can occur in finite dimensional glass-formers.

Identifying the nature of the glass transition is challenging because relevant experiments or analytical descriptions are hard to achieve. Here, Berthier et al. develop a Monte Carlo numerical tool to investigate two-dimensional glasses and find a zero-temperature thermodynamic glass transition.