title: Excitation chains at the glass transition.
abstract: The excitation-chain theory of the glass transition, proposed in an earlier publication, predicts diverging, super-Arrhenius relaxation times and, via a similarly diverging length scale, suggests a way of understanding the relations between dynamic and thermodynamic properties of glass-forming liquids. I argue here that critically large excitation chains play a role roughly analogous to that played by critical clusters in the droplet model of vapor condensation. Unlike a first-order condensation point in a vapor, the glass transition is not a conventional phase transformation, and may not be a thermodynamic transition at all.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9530, USA.
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Langer