A real-space description of the glass transition based on heterogeneities and entropy barriers

Andrea Crisanti, Felix Ritort

Published 2001-02-06, updated 2001-07-11Version 2

An alternative scenario for the glass transition based on the cooperative nature of nucleation processes and the role of entropic effects is presented. The new ingredient is to relate the dissipation during the relaxation process to the release of strain energy driven by the nucleation of progressively larger cooperative spatial regions. Using an equiprobability hypothesis for the transition between different metastable configurations, we obtain a relation between the free energy dissipation rate and the size of the largest cooperative regions. Th is leads to a new phenomenological relation between the largest relaxation time in the supercooled liquid phase and the effective temperature. This differs from the classical Adam-Gibbs relation in that predicts no divergence of the primary relaxation time at the Kauzmann temperature but a crossover from fragile to strong behavior.