Related papers: The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
The persistent problem posed by the glass transition is to develop a general atomic level description of a solidification process that is not associated with any change in the symmetry of the atomic structure. The answer proposed in this…
Glass-forming liquids grow dramatically sluggish upon cooling. This slowdown has long been thought to be accompanied by a growing correlation length. Characteristic dynamical and static length scales, however, have been observed to grow at…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
Amorphous solids are mechanically rigid while possessing a disordered structure similar to that of dense liquids. Recent research indicates that dynamical heterogeneity, spatio-temporal fluctuations in local dynamical behavior, might help…
One of the central problems of the liquid-glass transition is whether there is a structural signature that can qualitatively distinguish different dynamic behaviors at different degrees of supercooling. Here, we propose a novel structural…
We investigate experimentally the relationship between local structure and dynamical arrest in a quasi-2d colloidal model system which approximates hard discs. We introduce polydispersity to the system to suppress crystallisation. Upon…
Dynamic heterogeneity in glass-formers has been related to their static structure using the concept of dynamic propensity. We re-examine this relationship by analyzing dynamical fluctuations in two atomistic glass-formers and two…
Amorphous solids lack long-range order. Therefore identifying structural defects -- akin to dislocations in crystalline solids -- that carry plastic flow in these systems remains a daunting challenge. By comparing many different structural…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
The universal anomalous vibrational and thermal properties of amorphous solids are believed to be related to the local variations of the elasticity. Recently it has been shown that the vibrational properties are sensitive to the glass's…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
We investigate the characteristic length scales associated with the glass transition phenomenon. By studying an atomic glass-forming liquid in negatively curved space, for which the local order is well identified and the amount of…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
When a liquid freezes, a change in the local atomic structure marks the transition to the crystal. When a liquid is cooled to form a glass, however, no noticeable structural change marks the glass transition. Indeed, characteristic features…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…