CANCELED: The Quest for the Ideal Glass
- Speaker
-
Ludovic Berthier, Ph.D.Director of Research, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Laboratoire Charles Coulomb
Simons Foundation Lectures are free public colloquia related to basic science and mathematics. These high-level talks are intended for professors, students, postdocs and business professionals, but interested people from the metropolitan area are welcome as well.
We regret to tell you that Ludovic Berthier’s lecture, The Quest for the Ideal Glass, scheduled for Wednesday, March 11th, has been cancelled.
From now through April 15, 2020 Simons Foundation Lectures will be live-streamed, or, if that is not possible, cancelled entirely. It is very likely that our speakers and topics will change as well; we will contact you with updates as soon as they are available.
You can see updates about our other scheduled lectures here.
Please visit our lecture archive or our Simons Foundation Lectures YouTube playlist to rewatch or catch up on prior talks of interest.
We hope to see you online!
Simons Foundation Lectures
Most of the materials around us are structurally disordered, from window glass to emulsions to biological tissues. Scientists have long considered disordered materials as imperfect or defective versions of perfectly ordered crystals. Yet the concept of an ‘ideal’ glass has fascinated scientists for decades. Can such a thing be defined rigorously? Is it possible, or even useful, to prepare quasi-ideal disordered materials?
In this lecture, Ludovic Berthier will describe the world of amorphous materials and why scientists are interested in predicting and tuning their physical properties. The quest for a fundamental understanding of disordered materials has repeatedly led to the idea of an ‘ideal’ glassy state or an ‘optimal’ random structure. Modern theories of disordered systems offer refined descriptions of these elusive concepts but have also raised difficult questions about their applicability for real systems. In the last few years, novel experimental and computational techniques have been developed that bring actual materials much closer to the ideal glass state. This work reveals unexpected physical properties and sheds new light on the very concept of an ideal glass state of matter.