"Inner clocks" of glass-forming liquids.

Providing a physically sound explanation of aging phenomena in non-equilibrium amorphous materials is a challenging problem in modern statistical thermodynamics. The slow evolution of physical properties after quenches of control parameters is empirically well interpreted via the concept of material time (or internal clock) based on the Tool-Narayanaswamy-Moynihan model. Yet, the fundamental reasons of its striking success remain unclear.

Non-equilibrium relaxation and aging in the dynamics of a dipolar fluid quenched towards the glass transition.

The recently developed non-equilibrium self-consistent generalized Langevin equation theory of the dynamics of liquids of non-spherically interacting particles [20167975] is applied to the description of the irreversible relaxation of a thermally and mechanically quenched dipolar fluid. Specifically, we consider a dipolar hard-sphere liquid quenched (at= 0) from full equilibrium conditions towards different ergodic-non-ergodic transitions. Qualitatively different scenarios are predicted by the theory for the time evolution of the system after the quench (> 0), that depend on both the kind of transition approached and the specific features of the protocol of preparation.