Probing a critical length scale at the glass transition

Abstract

We give evidence of a clear structural signature of the glass transition, in terms of a static correlation length with the same dependence on the system size which is typical of critical phenomena. Our approach is to introduce an external, static perturbation to extract the structural information from the system's response. In particular, we consider the transformation behavior of the local minima of the underlying potential energy landscape (inherent structures), under a static deformation. The finite-size scaling analysis of our numerical results indicate that the correlation length diverges at a temperature $T_c$, below the temperatures here the system can be equilibrated. Our numerical results are consistent with random first order theory, which predicts such a divergence with a critical exponent $\nu =2/3$ at the Kauzmann temperature, where the extrapolated configurational entropy vanishes.

5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. 2010.

References in corpus (7)

• Supercooled Liquids for Pedestrians
• Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localised soft modes
• Growing length and time scales in glass forming liquids
• Inhomogeneous elastic response of silica glass
• Statistical Mechanics and Dynamics of a 3-Dimensional Glass-Forming System
• Non-affine deformations of inherent structure as signature of cooperativity in supercooled liquids
• Are there localized saddles behind the heterogeneous dynamics of supercooled liquids?

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
• Identification of long-lived clusters and their link to slow dynamics in a model glass former
• Finite size effects in the dynamics of glass-forming liquids
• Strong geometric frustration in model glassformers
• Characterizing order in amorphous systems
• Deformation of inherent structures to detect long-range correlations in supercooled liquids
• Potential-tuning molecular dynamics studies of fusion, and the question of ideal glassformers: (I) The Gay-Berne model