Francesco Turci

Francesco Turci

A liquid on the 3-sphere

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I am interested in nonequilibrium, disordered systems. Using theoretical and numerical tools, I investigate heterogeneous disordered media and active matter. My focus is on emergent properties, collective behaviour, and spatial structure in various systems, from glasses to animals, from gels to bones.

My experience in structural ordering in glasses and amorphous media is particularly relevant to the topic of APERIODIC. Glassy materials present various forms of local order, contributing to the characteristic slow dynamics of supercooled liquids and glasses. Such local order, in systems such as metallic glasses, is characterised by five-fold symmetric motifs, leading to short and medium-range icosahedral features. These geometries are intimately linked to the units of quasicrystal formation. However, in glasses, these are fluctuating and localized, with their growth limited by the mechanisms of geometric frustration. Various theories of the origin of the glass transitions exist and are in fierce competition: my work has brought forward a framework to unify the dynamical and structural pictures of the glass transitions, where the metastability of glassy configurations rich in icosahedral motifs can be quantified and lead to genuine nonequilibrium phase transitions.

I present an interactive visualisation https://two-worlds-6894690abbd3.herokuapp.com/ of the results of my investigation of a glass-forming liquid on a curved manifold. Five-fold symmetric motifs do not tile Euclidean space but can tile spheres. In this case, I show that a liquid on the surface of a 4D sphere spontaneously forms icosahedral motifs in higher or lower numbers depending on temperature and curvature. We see that for sufficiently high curvatures and low temperatures, a crystal of icosahedral is possible. These results have been discussed in detail in Turci et al PRL 118, 215501 (2017), DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.215501 .

Fracesco Turci obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Montpellier (France) in 2012 with a thesis on nonequilibrium phase transitions. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Luxembourg (2012-14), working on crystallisation and nonequilibrium surface tension. He was then a Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2014-2023), working on glasses, gels, and active and biological matter. From 2024, he is a Lecturer in Scientific Computing at the School of Physics, University of Bristol.

francescoturci.net
f.turci@bristol.ac.uk
@Francesco Turci
@fturci.bsky.social