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Crystal melting and the glass transition obey the similar bodily legislation

Crystal melting and the glass transition obey the similar bodily legislation
April 4, 2025


Crystal melting and the glass transition obey the similar bodily legislation

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The melting of crystals is the method during which an building up in temperature induces the disruption of the ordered crystalline lattice, resulting in the disordered construction and extremely fluctuating dynamic conduct of liquids. On the glass transition, the place an amorphous stable (a pitcher) turns right into a liquid, there is not any obtrusive substitute in construction, and most effective the dynamics of the atoms substitute, going from strongly localized dynamics in house (within the glass state) to the extremely fluctuating (diffusive) dynamics within the liquid.

The seek for the atomic-scale mechanism of 3-D crystal melting has a protracted historical past in physics, and well-known physicists similar to Max Born, Neville Mott and Frederick Lindemann proposed other ways to take a look at it. I’ve at all times had the affect that we nonetheless don’t perceive the melting of 3-D crystals, which is a extremely difficult cooperative procedure involving nonlinearly coupled dynamics of an enormous selection of atoms. This complexity I at all times discovered very attention-grabbing.
Relatively, the melting of 2D solids, mediated by means of dislocations-unbinding, is far better understood, and the idea that describes it resulted in the 2017 Nobel prize in physics for Kosterlitz and Thouless.
In fresh paintings with my collaborators in Germany, I came upon that the temperature at which crystals soften and the temperature at which glasses grow to be liquid are each proportional to the same amount: That is the ratio between the fragility of the supercooled liquid (which measures how steeply the viscosity will increase upon reducing the temperature of the liquid) and the thermal enlargement coefficient.
The latter measures how a lot the fabric dilates upon expanding the temperature, and due to this fact additionally how a lot farther aside two atoms transfer as temperature is higher. My colleagues and I came upon this elementary legislation empirically by means of striking in combination experimental knowledge for greater than 100 other supplies (polymers, atomic and molecular programs, metals, natural compounds).

Alternatively, regardless of its simplicity, the foundation of this legislation has remained unexplained, as a result of it might now not be derived mathematically from a concept of the underlying atomic motions.
Running with my colleague Konrad Samwer on the College of Goettingen (Germany) all through my Gauss visiting professorship there, I sooner or later controlled to mathematically derive this legislation from the respect of ways atomic motions and interatomic interactions conspire to provide the cast subject matter its macroscopic tension (encoded within the shear modulus).
By way of extending the unique melting criterion offered by means of Born to incorporate atomic motions which can be because of lattice defects and thermal fluctuations, and mixing this with a type of viscoelastic conduct because of Maxwell, my colleague and I confirmed that, certainly, each the melting temperature of the crystal and the glass transition temperature are without delay proportional to the stage of cooperativity of the atomic dynamics within the liquid (the fragility) and inversely proportional to the thermal enlargement of the cast. Our analysis is printed in The Magazine of Chemical Physics.
Those findings, but even so offering a method to a elementary drawback in physics that dates again greater than 100 years, can be utilized for the materials-by-design of phase-change supplies—supplies with tunable switching between liquid and stable, which may also be helpful in lots of technological programs, from electronics to protection.
This tale is a part of Science X Conversation, the place researchers can file findings from their printed analysis articles. Talk over with this web page for details about Science X Conversation and the way to take part.

Additional information:
Alessio Zaccone et al, Fragility and thermal enlargement keep an eye on crystal melting and the glass transition, The Magazine of Chemical Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1063/5.0253991. On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2503.13270
Bio:
Alessio Zaccone won his Ph.D. from the Division of Chemistry of ETH Zurich in 2010. From 2010 until 2014 he was once an Oppenheimer Analysis Fellow on the Cavendish Laboratory, College of Cambridge.
After being at the college of Technical College Munich (2014–2015) and of College of Cambridge (2015–2018), he has been a complete professor and chair of theoretical physics within the Division of Physics on the College of Milano since 2022. Awards come with the ETH Silver Medal, the 2020 Gauss Professorship of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Fellowship of Queens’ Faculty Cambridge, and an ERC Consolidator grant “Multimech”).
Analysis contributions come with the analytical method to the jamming transition drawback (Zaccone & Scossa-Romano PRB 2011), the analytical method to the random shut packing drawback in second and 3d (Zaccone PRL 2022), the idea of thermally-activated response fee processes in shear flows (Zaccone et al PRE 2009), the idea of crystal nucleation below shear waft (Mura & Zaccone PRE 2016), the theoretical prediction of boson-like peaks within the vibrational spectra of crystals (Milkus & Zaccone PRB 2016; Baggioli & Zaccone PRL 2019), the idea of the glass transition in polymers (Zaccone & Terentjev PRL 2013), the theoretical and computational discovery of topological defects in glasses (Baggioli, Kriuchevskyi, Sirk, Zaccone PRL 2021), and the theoretical prediction of superconductivity enhancement results because of phonon damping (Setty, Baggioli, Zaccone PRB 2020).
Analysis pursuits vary from the statistical physics of disordered programs (random packings, jamming, glasses and the glass transition, colloids, nonequilibrium thermodynamics) to solid-state physics and superconductivity.

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