Structural Glasses and Supercooled Liquids Theory, Experiment, and Applications

This book presents a modern, complete survey of glassy phenomena in many systems based on firmly established characteristics of the underlying molecular motions as deduced by first principle theoretical calculations, or with direct/single-molecule experimental techniques. An over-emphasis on curve fitting without theoretical support has created unnecessary confusion and limited our ability to control the corresponding use of glasses and glassy systems. The book offers a well-rounded view of a variety of disordered systems where cooperative phenomena, which are epitomized by supercooled liquids, take place.The articles are reviews and contain both detailed calculations and reasoned arguments closely corresponding with experimental data, making the book accessible to an educated non-expert reader. A broad class of phenomena associated with the structural glass transition and various glassy and disordered systems will be addressed. These systems include structural glasses and supercooled liquids, polymers, complex liquids, protein conformational dynamics, and strongly interacting electron systems with quenched/self-generated disorder.

Peter G. Wolynes, PhD, is the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science at Rice University. For his work, spanning chemical, biological, and condensed matter physics, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the German Academy of Sciences as well as to the Royal Society of London as a foreign member. Vassiliy Lubchenko, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Houston. A recipient of the Beckman Young Investigator Award and Sloan Research Fellowship, Dr. Lubchenko researches optoelectronic anomalies of amorphous materials, dynamics ,of complex fluids and structural" glasses, and aggregation behaviors in protein solutions.