Using cyclic shear to drive a two dimensional granular system, we determine the structural char-acteristics for different inter-particle friction coefficients. These characteristics are the result of acompetition between mechanical stability and entropy, with the latter’s effect increasing with fric-tion. We show that a parameter-free maximum-entropy argument alone predicts an exponential cell order distribution, with excellent agreement with the experimental observation. We show thatfriction only tunes the mean cell order and, consequently, the exponential decay rate and the pack-ing fraction. We further show that cells, which can be very large in such systems, are short-lived,implying that our systems are liquid-like rather than glassy..

Using molecular dynamics simulations we investigate the dependence of the structuraland vibrational properties of the surfaces of sodo-silicate glasses on the sodium content as well as the nature of the surface. Two types of glass surfaces are considered:A melt-formed surface (MS) in which a liquid with a free surface has been cooleddown into the glass phase and a fracture surface (FS) obtained by tensile loadingof a glass sample. We find that the MS is more abundant in Na and non-bridgingoxygen atoms than the FS and the bulk glass, whereas the FS has higher concentration of structural defects such as two-membered rings and under-coordinated Si thanthe MS. We associate these structural differences to the production histories of theglasses and the mobility of the Na ions. It is also found that for Na-poor systems thefluctuations in composition and local atomic charge density decay with a power-lawas a function of distance from the surface while Na-rich systems show an exponentialdecay with a typical decay length of ≈ 2.3 Å. The vibrational density of states showsthat the presence of the surfaces leads to a decrease of the characteristic frequenciesin the system. The two-membered rings give rise to a pronounce band at ≈ 880 cm−1which is in good agreement experimental observations.

We adapt and apply a recently developed optimization scheme used to obtain effective potentialsfor aluminosilicate glasses to include the network former boron into the interaction parameter set.As input data for the optimization, we used the radial distribution functions of the liquid at hightemperature generated by ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, and density, coordination andelastic modulus of glass at room temperature from experiments. The new interaction potentials areshown to reproduce reliably the structure, coordination and mechanical properties over a widerange of compositions for binary alkali borates. Furthermore, the transferability of these newinteraction parameters allows mixing to reliably reproduce properties of various boroaluminateand borosilicate glasses.

In order to determine in polymeric systems the geometrical mesh size ξ, we simulate a solution of coarse-grained polymers with densities ranging from the dilute to the concentrated regime and for different chain lengths. We determine the monomer density fluctuation correlation length ξc from the monomer structure factor as well as the radial distribution function, showing that the identification ξ = ξc is not justified outside of the semidilute regime. In order to better characterize ξ, we compute the pore size distribution (PSD) following two different definitions, one by Torquato et al. and one by Gubbins et al. We find that the mean values of the two distributions, ⟨r⟩T and ⟨r⟩G, display the behavior predicted for ξ by scaling theory, and argue that ξ can be identified with either one of these quantities. This identification allows to interpret the PSD as the distribution of mesh sizes, a quantity which conventional methods cannot access. Finally, we show that it is possible to map a polymer solution on a system of hard or overlapping spheres, for which Torquato’s PSD can be computed analytically and reproduces accurately the PSD of the solution. We give an expression that allows ⟨r⟩T to be estimated with high accuracy in the semidilute regime by knowing only the radius of gyration and the density of the polymers.