Measuring glass entropies with population annealing

Abstract

We combine population annealing Monte Carlo and several thermodynamic integration techniques to measure equilibrium vibrational and configurational entropies in the metastable fluid regime beyond the dynamic glass transition. We obtain results for a three-dimensional binary mixture hard sphere system. Our results suggest that the configurational entropy vanishes before the equilibrium pressure diverges, which implies that an underlying thermodynamic glass transition exists for this system. The computational methods are general and can be applied to a variety of glass forming systems but are restricted to small system sizes.