The generalized Peierls–Landau instability: a novel perspective on the nature of glasses?

In this paper we discuss the implications of a recent generalization of the well-known Peierls–Landau instability for low-dimensional crystalline lattices to a wide class of structurally disordered networks. We give a general thermodynamic interpretation of structural instabilities in disordered inhomogeneous systems and discuss the relevance of our results to the fundamental phenomenology of glasses.