Abstract

Computer simulations give unique insights into the microscopic behavior of disordered and amorphous materials, but typical simulated timescales are orders of magnitude shorter than experimentally relevant ones. In particular, simulations of supercooled liquids performed with standard techniques cover at most 5 decades of viscous slowing down, far behind the 13 decades commonly accessible in experiments. Recently, we have closed this enormous gap for a class of realistic models of liquids, which we can successfully equilibrate beyond laboratory time scales by means of a swap Monte Carlo algorithm achieving for some models over 11 orders of magnitude equilibration speedup. This exciting numerical advance allows us to address outstanding questions concerning glassy systems, such as the nature of the phase transition underlying glass formation and the exploration of the potential energy landscape governing low-temperature properties of glasses.