Glasses, replicas and all that

Abstract

In these lectures I will review the approach to glasses based on the replica formalism. Many of the physical ideas are very similar to those of older approaches. The replica approach has the advantage of describing in an unified setting both the behaviour near the dynamic transition (mode coupling transition) and near the equilibrium transition (Kauzman transition) that is present in fragile glasses. The replica method may be used to solve simple mean field models, providing explicit examples of systems that may be studied analytically in great details and behave similarly to the experiments. Finally, using the replica formalism, it is possible to do analytic explicit computations of the properties of realistic models of glasses and the results are in reasonable agreement with numerical simulations.

Lectures given at the les Houches 2002 summer school