Glassy aspects of melting dynamics (On melting dynamics and the glass transition, Part I)

Abstract: The following properties are in the present literature associated with the behavior of super-cooled glass-forming liquids: faster than exponential growth of the relaxation time, dynamical heterogeneities, growing point-to-set correlation length, crossover from mean field behavior to activated dynamics. In this paper we argue that these properties are also present in a much simpler situation, namely the melting of the bulk of an ordered phase beyond a first order phase transition point. This is a promising path towards a better theoretical, numerical and experimental understanding of the above phenomena and of the physics of super-cooled liquids. We discuss in detail the analogies and the differences between the glass and the bulk melting transitions.