Field Theory of Fluctuations in Glasses

Silvio Franz 1, Giorgio Parisi 2, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi 2, Tommaso Rizzo 2

The European Physical Journal E 34 (2011) 102

We develop a field-theoretical description of dynamical heterogeneities and fluctuations in supercooled liquids close to the (avoided) MCT singularity. Using quasi-equilibrium arguments we eliminate time from the description and we completely characterize fluctuations in the beta regime. We identify different sources of fluctuations and show that the most relevant ones are associated to variations of ‘self-induced disorder’ in the initial condition of the dynamics. It follows that heterogeneites can be describes through a cubic field theory with an effective random field term. The phenomenon of perturbative dimensional reduction ensues, well known in random field problems, which implies an upper critical dimension of the theory equal to 8. We apply our theory to finite size scaling for mean-field systems and we test its prediction against numerical simulations.

  • 1. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS),
    CNRS : UMR8626 – Université Paris XI – Paris Sud
  • 2. Dipartimento di Fisica and INFM,
    Università degli studi di Roma I – La Sapienza
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