Short and long range correlated motion observed in colloidal glasses and liquids
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
2007-08-09 v1 Soft Condensed Matter
Abstract
We use a confocal microscope to examine the motion of individual particles in a dense colloidal suspension. Close to the glass transition, particle motion is strongly spatially correlated. The correlations decay exponentially with particle separation, yielding a dynamic length scale of O(2-3 sigma) (in terms of particle diameter sigma). This length scale grows modestly as the glass transition is approached. Further, the correlated motion exhibits a strong spatial dependence on the pair correlation function g(r). Motion within glassy samples is weakly correlated, but with a larger spatial scale for this correlation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0610195,
title = {Short and long range correlated motion observed in colloidal glasses and liquids},
author = {Eric R. Weeks and John C. Crocker and David A. Weitz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0610195},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Submitted to J Phys: Cond Mat; for Workshop on Nonequilibrium Phenomena in Glasses (Pisa, September 2006)