Related papers: Cage properties and its implication to the existen…
We use confocal microscopy to study the motions of particles in concentrated colloidal systems. Near the glass transition, diffusive motion is inhibited, as particles spend time trapped in transient ``cages'' formed by neighboring…
A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…
We analyse structure and dynamics in simulated high-concentration hard sphere colloidal suspensions by means of calculations based on the void space. We show that remoteness, a quantity measuring the scale of spaces, is useful in studying…
Glassy dynamics is intermittent, as particles suddenly jump out of the cage formed by their neighbours, and heterogeneous, as these jumps are not uniformly distributed across the system. Relating these features of the dynamics to the…
The dynamics of a glass-forming material slow greatly near the glass transition, and molecular motion becomes inhibited. We use confocal microscopy to investigate the motion of colloidal particles near the colloidal glass transition. As the…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
We experimentally explore the morphological evolution of cages in quasi-two-dimensional suspensions of colloidal fluids, uncovering a complex dynamic restructuring in the fluid. Although cages display isotropic evolution in the laboratory…
The cage effect is widely accepted as the basic microscopic mechanism underlying the physics of supercooled liquids in contrast with usual liquids which are governed by molecular interactions only. In this work we implement a new toy model…
State-of-the-art techniques for simulating deeply supercooled liquids require a high degree of size polydispersity to be effective. While these techniques have enabled great insight into the microscopic dynamics near the glass transition,…
We examine the dynamics of hard spheres and discs at high packing fractions in two and three dimensions, modeling the simplest systems exhibiting a glass transition. As it is well known, cooperativity and dynamic heterogeneity arise as…
The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…
The cage effect is generally invoked when discussing the delay in the decay of time correlation functions of dense fluids. In an attempt to examine the role of caging more closely we consider the spread of the displacement distributions of…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
In this paper the phenomenon of dynamic heterogeneity in supercooled liquid systems is considered in terms of the recently proposed gauge theory of glass transition. The physical interpretation of the dynamic scaling is considered. It is…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
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…
Glass-forming materials are characterized by an intermittent motion at the microscopic scale. Particles spend most of their time rattling within the cages formed by their neighbors, and seldom jump to a different cage. In molecular glass…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
We formulate a new theory for how caging constraints in glass-forming liquids at a surface or interface are modified and then spatially transferred, in a layer-by-layer bootstrapped manner, into the film interior in the context of the…
The glass problem is notoriously hard and controversial. Even at the mean-field level, little is agreed about how a fluid turns sluggish while exhibiting but unremarkable structural changes. It is clear, however, that the process involves…