Effective potential in glassy systems: theory and simulations

Silvio Franz, Giorgio Parisi

Published 1997-11-21Version 1

We study the phase diagram of glassy systems in presence of an attractive coupling among real replicas. We find competition among a localized and a delocalized phase, that are separated by a coexistence line as in ordinary first order phase transitions. The coexistence line terminates in a critical point. We present numerical simulations for binary glasses in which show that this scenario is realized.