Here we built a liquid where each particle also interacts with a few distant "pseudo neighbors," smoothly tuning it from an ordinary 3D liquid toward an idealized mean-field system. This makes the configurational entropy vanish well before the dynamics visibly slow down — usually a difficult signal to detect directly. We found the missing signature hidden in bond dynamics: bonds to pseudo neighbors persist far longer than ordinary bonds, and the number of these survivors predicts the thermodynamic transition temperature almost exactly. [Read the paper →] 

A well-known way to probe the glass transition is to freeze a few particles in place and watch the liquid slow down around them. This work asks whether naturally heavy, slow particles can do the same job. We show they act as effective pinning centers at high temperature, but at low temperature their motion couples with the surrounding liquid and the analogy breaks down — unless the particles are made heavy enough to resist that coupling.  [Read the paper →]