On melting dynamics and the glass transition. I. Glassy aspects of melting dynamics

The following properties are in the present literature associated with the behavior of supercooled glass-forming liquids: faster than exponential growth of the relaxation time, dynamical heterogeneities, growing point-to-set correlation length, crossover from mean-field behavior to activated dynamics. In this paper we argue that these properties are also present in a much simpler situation, namely the melting of the bulk of an ordered phase beyond a first order phase transition point. This is a promising path toward a better theoretical, numerical and experimental understanding of the above phenomena and of the physics of supercooled liquids. We discuss in detail the analogies and the differences between the glass and the bulk melting transitions. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3506841]