On the `mosaic' picture of liquids and glasses

Jorge Kurchan

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arXiv · 2406.15820

On the `mosaic' picture of liquids and glasses

Jorge Kurchan

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Abstract

Supercooled liquids are sometimes described as being composed of a mosaic of patches that may be listed in a `library', each one having some form of non-periodic order. Looking closer, one finds this construction elusive. In attempting to give the notion of mosaic a precise sense, we find that we are inevitably led to the construction of a procedure for compressing the information in the particle configuration, essentially the same as that used for texts. The amount of optimally stored information directly defines the configurational entropy. A solid, in this view, is a particle arrangement described by a low amount of information, that can only flow by breaking into uncorrelated pieces, thus increasing its complexity.

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Jorge Kurchan. 2024-06-22. On the `mosaic' picture of liquids and glasses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15820

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