Frustration-limited domain theory of supercooled liquids and the glass transition

We present a novel, and what we believe to be a reasonably successful, way of looking at supercooled liquids. It attributes the salient properties of these latter to the formation of supermolecular domains that, because of inherent structural frustration, grow only at a modest rate when the temperature is decreased. The theoretical approach is based on the postulated existence of a narrowly avoided critical point at a temperature T* and makes use of scaling about but below this T*. Application to the description of the structural (alpha) relaxations and to the explanation of various apparently anomalous properties of supercooled liquids is discussed.