Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry

Peter G. Wolynes, University of California, San Diego. Supercooled liquids and glasses can be viewed as aperiodic crystals. Pursuing this view leads to the random first order transition theory of glasses. A liquid in this picture can be thought of as a mosaic of local energy landscapes. The theory explains quantitatively, without adjustable parameters, the super-Arrhenius slowing of dynamics and emergence of nonexponential relaxation in the supercooled liquid regime.