# Difference between revisions of "Percolation Model for Slow Dynamics in Glass-Forming Materials"

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Entry: Chia Wei Hsu, AP 225, Fall 2010

G. Lois, J. Blawzdziewicz, and C. S. O'Hern, "Percolation Model for Slow Dynamics in Glass-Forming Materials", Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 015702 (2009).

## Summary

In this work, the authors propose an alternate approach to understand the glass transition. Instead of looking at the real space, they focus on the configuration space of the system. There are mobility regions in the configuration space, and the percolation of these regions corresponds to a glass-to-liquid transition. With a mean-field description of such percolation, they show that the stretched-exponential response functions typical of glassy systems can be explained.

## Background

Glassy systems exhibit several unique properties. During a glass transition, the structural relaxation time increases by several orders of magnitude. Also, the structural correlations display an anomalous stretched-exponential time decay: $exp(-t/\tau_{\alpha})^{\beta}$, where $\beta$ is called the stretching exponent, and $\tau_{\alpha}$ is called the $\alpha$-relaxation time.