CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

What is the origin of the sharp slowdown displayed by glassy systems? Physical common sense suggests there must be a concomitant growing correlation length, but finding this length has been nontrivial. In random first-order theory, it is given by the size of amorphous excitations, which depends on a balance between their mutual interfacial energy and their configurational entropy. But how these excitations disappear when crossing over to the normal high temperature phase is unclear, chiefly due to lack of data about the surface tension. We measure the energy cost for creating amorphous excitations in a model glass-former, and discover that the surface tension vanishes at a well- defined spinodal energy, above which amorphous excitations cannot be sustained. This spinodal therefore marks the true onset of glassiness.