On the `mosaic' picture of liquids and glasses

Abstract

Supercooled liquids are sometimes described as being composed of a mosaic of patches that may be listed in a `library', each one having some form of non-periodic order. Looking closer, one finds this construction elusive. In attempting to give the notion of mosaic a precise sense, we find that we are inevitably led to the construction of a procedure for compressing the information in the particle configuration, essentially the same as that used for texts. The amount of optimally stored information directly defines the configurational entropy. A solid, in this view, is a particle arrangement described by a low amount of information, that can only flow by breaking into uncorrelated pieces, thus increasing its complexity.