Allan Adams, Tarek Anous, Jaehoon Lee, Sho Yaida
Supercooled liquids exhibit a dramatic dynamical slowdown as the temperature is lowered. This can be attributed to relaxation proceeding via large structural rearrangements, whose characteristic size increases as the temperature decreases. These cooperative rearrangements are well modeled by instantons in a replica effective field theory, with the size of the dominant instanton encoding the liquid's cavity point-to-set correlation length. We show that, for a wide range of parameters, a novel class of replica-symmetry-breaking instantons dominates. We systematically construct these instantons and explore the subtle energetics governing their existence. Our methods extend naturally to the full parameter space of the effective theory, laying the groundwork for a complete analysis of point-to-set correlations in glassy systems.
