A general approach to systems with randomly pinned particles: Unfolding and clarifying the Random Pinning Glass Transition

Pinning a fraction of particles from an equilibrium configuration in supercooled liquids has been recently proposed as a way to induce a new kind of glass transition, the Random Pinning Glass Transition (RPGT). The RPGT has been predicted to share some features of standard thermodynamic glass transitions and usual first-order ones. Thanks to its special nature, the approach and the study of the RPGT appears to be a fairly reachable task compared to the daunting problem of inspecting standard glass transitions. In this letter we generalize the pinning particle procedure. We study a mean-field system where the pinned configuration is extracted from the equilibrium distribution at temperature T' and the thermodynamics of the non-pinned particles is observed at a lower temperature T. A more complicated physics emerges from this generalization eventually clarifying the origin and the peculiar characteristics of the RPGT. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2013