Ageing, rheology and effective temperature in a glass-forming system

In this paper, I review some of the recent results obtained, using molecular dynamics simulations, on the out-of-equilibrium behaviour of glass-forming systems. Both the ageing (evolution after a fast quench in the glassy phase) and the driven (evolution under uniform shear flow) situations are considered. The theoretical concept of effective temperature that was shown to characterize such nonequilibrium states well is also discussed.