Related papers: Correlation between crystalline order and vitrific…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
The relationship between the microscopic arrangement of molecules in a supercooled liquid and its slow dynamics at low temperature near glass transition is studied by Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. A Lennard-Jones liquid with…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
We use the isoconfigurational (IC) ensemble to show the connection between emerging heterogeneities in the tetrahedral order parameter and the dynamic propensity in a mildly undercooled glass-forming liquid. We observe that spatially…
As approaching the glass transition, particle motion in liquids becomes highly heterogeneous and regions with virtually no mobility coexist with liquid-like domains. This complex dynamics is believed to be responsible for different…
We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. Samples in the glassy state show aging, in that the motion of the colloidal particles slows as the sample ages from an initial state. We study the…
A link between structural ordering and slow dynamics has recently attracted much attention from the context of the origin of glassy slow dynamics. Candidates for such structural order are icosahedral, exotic amorphous, and crystal-like.…
We investigate the connection between local structure and dynamical heterogeneity in supercooled liquids. Through the study of four different models we show that the correlation between a particle's mobility and the degree of local order in…
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…
We study the relationship between local structural ordering and dynamical heterogeneities in a model glass-forming liquid, the Wahnstrom mixture. A novel cluster-based approach is used to detect local energy minimum polyhedral clusters and…
The precise nature of complex structural relaxation as well as an explanation for the precipitous growth of relaxation time in cooling glass-forming liquids are essential to the understanding of vitrification of liquids. The dramatic…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
We numerically study dynamics and correlation length scales of a colloidal liquid in both quiescent and sheared conditions to further understand the origin of slow dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in glass-forming systems. The simulation…
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…
In a recent letter, Kawasaki et al. (PRL 99, 215701 (2007)) study glass formation in a 2-dimensional (2D) model of polydisperse repulsive disks. They give numerical evidence for a direct relation between slowing down of the relaxation,…
We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…
Computer simulations give precious insight into the microscopic behavior of supercooled liquids and glasses, but their typical time scales are orders of magnitude shorter than the experimentally relevant ones. We recently closed this gap…
We study the phase ordering dynamics of a two dimensional model colloidal solid using molecular dynamics simulations. The colloid particles interact with each other with a Hamaker potential modified by the presence of equatorial "patches"…
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…
Many systems, including polymers and molecular liquids, when adequately cooled and/or compressed, solidify into a disordered solid, i.e., a glass. The~transition is not abrupt, featuring progressive decrease of the microscopic mobility and…