Calorimetric glass transition in a mean-field theory approach

Abstract

The study of the properties of glass-forming liquids is difficult for many reasons. Analytic solutions of mean-field models are usually available only for systems embedded in a space with an unphysically high number of spatial dimensions; on the experimental and numerical side, the study of the properties of metastable glassy states requires thermalizing the system in the supercooled liquid phase, where the thermalization time may be extremely large. We consider here a hard-sphere mean-field model that is solvable in any number of spatial dimensions; moreover, we easily obtain thermalized configurations even in the glass phase. We study the 3D version of this model and we perform Monte Carlo simulations that mimic heating and cooling experiments performed on ultrastable glasses. The numerical findings are in good agreement with the analytical results and qualitatively capture the features of ultrastable glasses observed in experiments.