What is it about?
Condensed matter still features many difficult and even mysterious aspects of its physical behavior. Among them, the glass transition and its cooperative nature at the molecular scale ranks at the top. The work sheds light on the detailed physics of materials'responses and contributes to the quantitative and computationally fast prediction of actual experimental behavior at any temperature and any time scale.
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Why is it important?
It physically explains previously unresolved riddles of materials'physical behavior and provides fast predictions of that behavior which agree with the experimental behavior. The breadth and computational speed of the calculations cannot be matched by present (and likely futrure) direct molecular dynamics simulations.
Perspectives
This work is an example of, and started with (like other endeavours in physics), an abductive reasoning exercise on the actual physical nature of molecular coopertivity in materials'responses. From that initial conjecture, the main physical mechanisms and quantitative peculiarities of the mechanical, thermal, etc. responses of most materials could be very closely reproduced, such as to accurately describe the known effects of temperature, excitation intensity and time scale (observation time and/or frequency of excitation).
Professor José Joaquim Costa Cruz Pinto
University of Aveiro
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Toward the accurate modeling of amorphous nonlinear materials-polymer stress relaxation (I), Polymer Engineering & Science, January 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/pen.24260.
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