Supercooled Liquids and Glass Formation

Various static and dynamic phenomena displayed by glass-forming liquids, particularly those near the so-called "fragile " limit, emerge as manifestations of the multidimensional complex topography of the collective potential energy function. These include non-Arrhenius viscosity and relaxation times, bifurcation between the a- and ~-relaxation processes, and a breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relation for self-diffusion. This mul-tidimensional viewpoint also produces an extension of the venerable Undemann melting criterion and provides a critical evaluation of the popular "ideal glass state " concept. M ethods for preparing amorphous solids include a wide range of techniques. One of the most prominent, both historically and in current practice, involves cooling a vis-cous liquid below its thermodynamic freez-ing point, through a metastable super-cooled regime, and finally below a "glass transition " temperature T8. A qualitative understanding, at the molecular level, has long been available for materials produced by this latter preparative sequence; how-ever, many key aspects of a detailed quan-titative description are still missing. For