Structural Glass Transition and the Entropy of the Metastable States

Abstract

The metastable states of a glass are localized and counted by adding a weak pinning field that explicitly breaks the ergodicity. The entropy of the metastable states, that is, the logarithm of their number, is extensive in a range of temperatures ${T}_{s}<T<{T}_{c}$ only. It is argued that ${T}_{s}$ and ${T}_{c}$ are the ideal calorimetric and kinetic transition temperatures, respectively. An explicit computation of the metastable states entropy for a $({\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\ensuremath{\varphi}}}^{2}{)}^{2}$ model is given.