Surface tension fluctuations and a new spinodal point in glass-forming liquids

Abstract

The dramatic slowdown of glass-forming liquids has been variously linked to increasing dynamic and static correlation lengths. Yet, empirical evidence is insufficient to decide among competing theories. The random first order theory (RFOT) links the dynamic slowdown to the growth of amorphous static order, whose range depends on a balance between configurational entropy and surface tension. This last quantity is expected to vanish when the temperature surpasses a spinodal point beyond which there are no metastable states. Here we measure for the first time the surface tension in a model glass-former, and find that it vanishes at the energy separating minima from saddles, demonstrating the existence of a spinodal point for amorphous metastable order. Moreover, the fluctuations of surface tension become smaller for lower temperatures, in quantitative agreement with recent theoretical speculation that spatial correlations in glassy systems relax nonexponentially because of the narrowing of the surface tension distribution.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

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• Mosaic multi-state scenario vs. one-state description of supercooled liquids
• Numerical determination of the exponents controlling the relationship between time, length and temperature in glass-forming liquids
• A Tiling Approach to Counting Inherent Structures in Hard Potential Systems

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• Deformation of inherent structures to detect long-range correlations in supercooled liquids
• Fluctuations and Shape of Cooperative Rearranging Regions in Glass-Forming Liquids
• Microscopic theory of the glassy dynamics of passive and active network materials
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• First Principle Computation of Random Pinning Glass Transition, Glass Cooperative Length-Scales and Numerical Comparisons
• Static self-induced heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids: Overlap as a microscope