Colloquium: What makes a glass solid?

ABSTRACT

Solid-state textbooks describe in detail the mechanical and transport properties of crystalline solids, but give only minimal attention to non-crystalline solids, or glasses. This is because, despite their ubiquity in technology and daily life—from optical fibers and display screens to metallic glasses and polymer materials—we still lack a first-principles theory of their properties. In this talk, I will discuss recent results that address the most fundamental question of all: why are glasses solid?

BIOGRAPHY

Massimo Pica Ciamarra is a Nanyang Associate Professor and Assistant Chair at the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on leave from the Italian National Research Council. He received his PhD in Fundamental and Applied Physics from the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and has held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Future in Research Award from the Italian Ministry for Research.

His research explores the physics of disordered systems, including glasses, colloids, soft matter, biological tissues, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on understanding how microscopic structure governs dynamics and emerging properties. He develops computational and theoretical tools to study relaxation, energy landscapes, and collective phenomena in complex materials.