Microscopic Theory of a Fluctuation-Induced Dynamical Crossover in Supercooled Liquids.

Authors

Corentin C L Laudicina, Liesbeth M C Janssen, Grzegorz Szamel

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 11. Pages 118201. Sep 11, 2026.

Abstract

Mean-field theories of the glass transition predict a phase transition to a dynamically arrested state, yet no such transition is observed in experiments or simulations of finite-dimensional systems. We resolve this long-standing discrepancy by incorporating critical dynamical fluctuations into a microscopic mode-coupling framework. We show that these fluctuations round off the mean-field singularity and restore ergodicity at all finite densities (or temperatures) without invoking activated dynamics or facilitation. The resulting effective theory describes the order parameter as a stochastic process with self-induced, annealed disorder, determined self-consistently at the mean-field level. In the β-relaxation regime it reduces to stochastic beta-relaxation theory, thereby unifying mode-coupling and replica-based approaches beyond mean field. All parameters of the stochastic beta-relaxation theory are fixed by the static structure, enabling parameter-free predictions that extend mean-field theory into finite dimensions.

PMID:
42789884
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 26 Sep 2026.

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