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A thermodynamic description of colloidal glasses (1306.2912v2)
Published 12 Jun 2013 in cond-mat.dis-nn, cond-mat.soft, and cond-mat.stat-mech
Abstract: The phase behavior of hard-sphere particles interacting with a short-ranged potential is studied in the limit of infinite space dimensionality via the Franz-Parisi approach and the replica method of disordered systems. For an attractive square-well potential the phase diagram exhibits reentrancy of the liquid-glass transition, multiple glass states and glass-glass transition. For a repulsive square shoulder potential no such special features are observed. Our results show that the Franz-Parisi approach can be consistently extended to deal with higher-order glass singularities and that interparticle attraction is crucial for complex glassy behavior in large enough dimensions, at least for monodisperse systems.