Random pinning glass transition: Hallmarks, mean-field theory and renormalization group analysis

We present a detailed analysis of glass transitions induced by pinning particles at random from an equilibrium configuration. We first develop a mean-field analysis based on the study of p-spin spherical disordered models and then obtain the three-dimensional critical behavior by the Migdal-Kadanoff real space renormalization group method. We unveil the important physical differences with the case in which particles are pinned from a random (or very high temperature) configuration. We contrast the pinning particles approach to the ones based on biasing dynamical trajectories with respect to their activity and on coupling to equilibrium configurations. Finally, we discuss numerical and experimental tests. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4790400]