Geometrical Frustration and Static Correlations in a Simple Glass Former

Abstract

We study the geometrical frustration scenario of glass formation for simple hard-sphere models. We find that the dual picture in terms of defects brings little insight and no theoretical simplification for the understanding of the slowing down of relaxation, because of the strong frustration characterizing these systems. The possibility of a growing static length is furthermore found to be physically irrelevant in the regime that is accessible to computer simulations.