Non-monotonic temperature evolution of dynamic correlations in glass-forming liquids
By Walter Kob, Sándalo Roldán-Vargas, Ludovic Berthier. Nature Physics, 2011
186 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The viscosity of glass-forming liquids increases by many orders of magnitude if their temperature is lowered by a mere factor of 2–3. Recent studies suggest that this widespread phenomenon is accompanied by spatially heterogeneous dynamics, and a growing dynamic correlation length quantifying the extent of correlated particle motion. Here we use a novel numerical method to detect and quantify spatial correlations that reveal a surprising non-monotonic temperature evolution of spatial dynamical correlations, accompanied by a second length scale that grows monotonically and has a very different nature. Our results directly unveil a dramatic qualitative change in atomic motions near the mode-coupling crossover temperature, which involves no fitting or indirect theoretical interpretation. These findings impose severe new constraints on the theoretical description of the glass transition, and open several research perspectives, in particular for experiments, to confirm and quantify our observations in real materials. Glass-forming liquids are generally thought to relax through a collective rearrangement of domains, correlated over a length scale that increases with decreasing temperature. A numerical study now reveals a surprising twist to the story, claiming that relaxation depends non-monotonically on temperature.
Subfields: Ceramics and Composites, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aa69b920e163fb10a86263d474cd59ab7a80e13
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In Ceramics and Composites
In Condensed Matter Physics
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Revealing Hidden Structural Order Controlling Both Fast and Slow Glassy Dynamics in Supercooled Liquids (2018, methodology): “[19] by the PTS method in (f) for a comparison: the dynamic length ξ s × 1.”
- The role of local structure in dynamical arrest (2014, background): “Pinning, or point-to-set measures as they are also known, can similarly be used to extract structural lengthscales [221,222] (see Section 3.”