Abstract
This special issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter contains the proceedings of the workshop `Unifying Concepts in Glass Physics', 15-18 September 1999 at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. As the title suggests, the goal was to bring together active scientists working on elucidating theoretical concepts common to systems exhibiting glassy behaviour. The past decade has seen a renaissance of sorts in the field of glass physics, due to the advancement and development of new theoretical ideas and experimental findings made possible by new or refined techniques and especially to the use of computer simulations in testing theories and providing insight into the nature of glass-forming systems. This workshop provided theoreticians with an opportunity to debate many of the currently invoked theoretical concepts, and discuss their similarities and differences. Although the major emphasis was on phenomena related to structural glass formers and the phenomenology of glassy dynamics and the glass transition in supercooled liquids, many contributions concerned related problems in spin systems, granular materials, etc. Among the themes represented were the role of energy landscapes of glass formers, thermodynamic aspects of glassy behaviour, aging, mode coupling theory and spatially heterogeneous dynamics.
Participants were asked to submit preliminary contributions prior to the workshop, and these manuscripts, together with comments by co-participants, are available on the web athttp://www.ictp.trieste.it/~franz/workshop.html. Ample time was provided in each session for open discussion. The many participants who attended the workshop represented most of the dominant themes of research in the physics of glassy systems.
While no workshop proceedings can be truly comprehensive, the peer-reviewed contributions in this volume together provide a representative survey of the state of the art in current theoretical concepts regarding glassy behaviour. We have insisted as much as possible on clarity of exposition, in addition to rigorous standards of scientific merit. We hope it will be a useful compendium both for people who seek an introduction to this exciting area of research and those who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments.
Finally, we would like to thank the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, which financed and hosted the workshop; in particular, the director of the center Professor Miguel Virasoro, and Ms Elizabeth Brancaccio, who attended to the numerous details of organizing the workshop. We would like to thank the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA, for financial support for these proceedings. We wish to thank Jason Wilde of IOP Publishing for reviewing and accepting our proposal to publish the proceedings inJournal of Physics: Condensed Matter, and Sharon D'Souza and Jacky Mucklow at IOP Publishing for assisting us on editorial and production matters. Most of all, we thank the participants of the workshop for a lively and stimulating discourse on theoretical concepts in glass physics.
Silvio Franz (ICTP, Trieste, Italy)
Sharon C Glotzer (NIST, Gaithersburg, USA)
Srikanth Sastry (JNCASR, Bangalore, India)