Glassy Dynamics in a Model without Disorder Spin Analog of a Structural Glass.pdfVIP

GLASSY DYNAMICS IN A MODEL WITHOUT DISORDER: SPIN ANALOG OF A STRUCTURAL GLASS LEI GU, BULBUL CHAKRABORTY 6 Department of Physics, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02254, USA, 9 bulbul@snow.cc.brandeis.edu 9 1 c Paper presented at MRS Fall Meeting, Dec 1996 e D ABSTRACT 1 1 We have analyzed a non-randomly frustrated spin model which exhibits behavior remarkably ] similar to the phenomenology of structural glasses. The high-temperature disordered phase h c undergoes a strong first-order transition to a long-range ordered structure. Using Monte e Carlo simulations, we have studied the behavior of the supercooled state by quenching to m- temperatures below this transition temperature. For a range of supercooling, the system t remains ergodic and exhibits dynamics characteristic of supercooled liquids. Below a certain a t characteristic temperature, however, the system freezes into a “glassy” phase. In this phase, s . t the system is non-ergodic and evolves through a distribution of traps characterized by a a m power-law distribution of trapping times. This change in the dynamic behavior is concurrent - with the appearance of a shear instability. d n INTRODUCTION o c [ Understanding of glassy dynamics and the glass transition remains as one of the significant 1 challenges in condensed matter physics. Recent experiments on glasses [1,2] have led to some v interesting observations regarding the glass transition in structural glasses and indicated 3 some similarities between spin glasses and structural glasses [2]. On the theoretical side, a 0 1 lot of interest has been focused on spin models without quenched-in disorder which e