Model for dynamics of structural glasses

glasses. We observe stretched-exponential decays ( a relaxation! of the equilibrium spin autocorrelation function at late times and are able to estimate accurately the corresponding relaxation times t. These are found to diverge at nonzero temperatures following a Vogel-Fulcher law. In addition, we observe early-time exponential relaxation analogous to b relaxation of glass formers. We also examined the effective thermodynamics of systems quenched below this divergent temperature and subsequently heated. The result is a peak in the specific heat with properties matching those of the putative glass transition. We also find that these peaks, for different heating rates, can be rescaled to lie on a universal curve. Finally, we studied the evolving structure factor of a frozen glass following a rapid jump in temperature. The results are qualitatively the same as those for x-ray studies of heated glasses. We thus demonstrate that this purely dynamical microscopic model can reproduce much of the phenomenology of the glass transition and near-glass relaxation, with no tunable parameters. @S1063-651X~97!07301-7#