Equilibrium simulations of supercooled liquids beyond the laboratory glass transition
Résumé
Computer simulations give precious insight into the microscopic behavior of amorphous materials, but their typical timescales are orders of magnitude shorter than the experimentally relevant ones. We close this enormous gap for a class of polydisperse models, which we successfully equilibrate beyond experimental timescales by means of the swap Monte Carlo algorithm. This numerical advance allows us to address some crucial outstanding questions, such as the relationship between jamming and glass transitions and the relevance of an entropy crisis for glass formation.