Concentration of empirical distribution functions with applications to non-i.i.d. models

The concentration of empirical measures is studied for dependent data, whose joint distribution satisfies Poincar\'{e}-type or logarithmic Sobolev inequalities. The general concentration results are then applied to spectral empirical distribution functions associated with high-dimensional random matrices.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/10-BEJ254 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Equilibrium route to colloidal gellation: mixtures of hard sphere-like colloids

The binodals and the non-ergodicity lines of a binary mixture of hard sphere-like particles with large size ratio are computed for studying the interplay between dynamic arrest and phase separation in depletion-driven colloidal mixtures. Contrarily to the case of hard core plus short range effective attraction, physical gellation without competition with the fluid-phase separation can occur in such mixtures. This behavior due to the oscillations in the depletion potential should concern all simple mixtures with non-ideal depletant, justifying further studies of their dynamic properties

Glass Dynamics at High Strain Rates

We present a shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theoretical analysis of molecular-dynamics simulations of a rapidly sheared metallic glass. These simulations are especially revealing because, although they are limited to high strain rates, they span temperatures ranging from well below to well above the glass transition. With one important discrepancy, the STZ theory reproduces the simulation data, including the way in which those data can be made to collapse onto simple curves by a scaling transformation. The STZ analysis implies that the system's behavior at high strain rates is controlled primarily by effective-temperature thermodynamics, as opposed to system-specific details of the molecular interactions. The discrepancy between theory and simulations occurs at the lower strain rates for temperatures near the glass transition. We argue that this discrepancy can be resolved by the same multi-species generalization of STZ theory that has been proposed recently for understanding frequency-dependent viscoelastic responses, Stokes-Einstein violations, and stretched-exponential relaxation in equilibrated glassy materials.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Vibrational origin of the fast relaxation processes in molecular glass-formers

We study the interaction of the relaxation processes with the density fluctuations by molecular dynamics simulation of a flexible molecule model for o-terphenyl (oTP) in the liquid and supercooled phases. We find evidence, besides the structural relaxation, of a secondary vibrational relaxation whose characteristic time, few ps, is slightly temperature dependent. This i) confirms the result by Monaco et al. [Phys. Rev, E 62, 7595 (2000)] of the vibrational nature of the fast relaxation observed in Brillouin Light Scattering (BLS) experiments in oTP; and ii) poses a caveat on the interpretation of the BLS spectra of molecular systems in terms of a purely center of mass dynamics.Comment: RevTeX, 5 pages, 4 eps figure

Arak Inequalities for Concentration Functions and the Littlewood--Offord Problem: a shortened version

Let $X,X_1,\ldots,X_n$ be independent identically distributed random variables. In this paper we study the behavior of concentration functions of weighted sums $\sum_{k=1}^{n} X_k a_k$ with respect to the arithmetic structure of coefficients~$a_k$ in the context of the Littlewood--Offord problem. Concentration results of this type received renewed interest in connection with distributions of singular values of random matrices. Recently, Tao and Vu proposed an Inverse Principle in the Littlewood--Offord problem. We discuss the relations between the Inverse Principle of Tao and Vu as well as that of Nguyen and Vu and a similar principle formulated for sums of arbitrary independent random variables in the work of Arak from the 1980's. This paper is a shortened and edited version of the preprint arXiv:1506.09034. Here we present the results without proofs.Comment: 9 pages. shortened version of arXiv:1506.0903

Convergence to Stable Laws in Relative Entropy

Convergence to stable laws in relative entropy is established for sums of i.i.d. random variables

The mean-squared displacement of a molecule moving in a glassy system

The mean-squared displacement (MSD) of a hard sphere and of a dumbbell molecule consisting of two fused hard spheres immersed in a dense hard-sphere system is calculated within the mode-coupling theory for ideal liquid-glass transitions. It is proven that the velocity correlator, which is the second time derivative of the MSD, is the negative of a completely monotone function for times within the structural-relaxation regime. The MSD is found to exhibit a large time interval for structural relaxation prior to the onset of the $\alpha$-process which cannot be described by the asymptotic formulas for the mode-coupling-theory-bifurcation dynamics. The $\alpha$-process for molecules with a large elongation is shown to exhibit an anomalously wide cross-over interval between the end of the von-Schweidler decay and the beginning of normal diffusion. The diffusivity of the molecule is predicted to vary non-monotonically as function of its elongation.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, Phys. Rev. E, in prin