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.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. 2010.

References in corpus (17)

• Testing Mode-Coupling Theory for a Supercooled Binary Lennard-Jones Mixture I: The van Hove Correlation Function
• Direct experimental evidence of a growing length scale accompanying the glass transition
• Supercooled Liquids for Pedestrians
• The relationship between fragility, configurational entropy and the potential energy landscape of glass forming liquids
• Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localised soft modes
• Inherent Structure Entropy of Supercooled Liquids
• Fragilities of Liquids Predicted from the Random First Order Transition Theory of Glasses
• Thermodynamic signature of growing amorphous order in glass-forming liquids
• Growing length and time scales in glass forming liquids
• Inhomogeneous elastic response of silica glass
• The thermodynamical liquid-glass transition in a Lennard-Jones binary mixture
• Statistical Physics of Structural Glasses
• On the critical behavior of the specific heat in glass-formers
• 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?
• Efficient Monte Carlo simulation of a glass forming binary mixture

Cited by in corpus (36)

• The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
• Bond orientational ordering in liquids: Towards a unified description of water-like anomalies, liquid-liquid transition, glass transition, and crystallization
• Connectivity of the Icosahedral Network and a Dramatically Growing Static Length Scale in Cu-Zr Binary Metallic Glasses
• Identification of long-lived clusters and their link to slow dynamics in a model glass former
• Theories of Glass Formation and the Glass Transition
• Finite size effects in the dynamics of glass-forming liquids
• Low-energy quasilocalized excitations in structural glasses
• Highly accelerated simulations of glassy dynamics using GPUs: caveats on limited floating-point precision
• Lifetimes and Lengthscales of Structural Motifs in a Model Glassformer
• Strong geometric frustration in model glassformers
• Direct Estimate of the Static Length-Scale Accompanying the Glass Transition
• The race to the bottom: approaching the ideal glass?
• Random Pinning Glass Model
• Importance of many-body correlations in glass transition: an example from polydisperse hard spheres
• Soft modes and non-affine rearrangements in the inherent structures of supercooled liquids
• Characterizing order in amorphous systems
• The nature of geometric frustration in the Kob-Andersen mixture
• Roles of liquid structural ordering in glass transition, crystallization, and water's anomalies
• Cage-jump motion reveals universal dynamics and non-universal structural features in glass forming liquids
• Effect of attractions on correlation length scales in a glass-forming liquid
• A dynamical relation between dual finite temperature classical and zero temperature quantum systems: quantum critical jamming and quantum dynamical heterogeneities
• Correlation between crystalline order and vitrification in colloidal monolayers
• Deformation of inherent structures to detect long-range correlations in supercooled liquids
• Pinning Susceptibility : A Novel Method to Study Growth of Amorphous Order in Glass-forming Liquids
• Manifestation of Random First Order Transition theory in Wigner glasses
• Linking dynamical heterogeneity to static amorphous order
• Non-equilibrium thermodynamics. II: Application to inhomogeneous systems
• A Dramatically Growing Shear Rigidity Length Scale in a Supercooled Glass Former ($NiZ{r}_2$)
• On the mechanism of the highly viscous flow
• Polymer unfolding and motion synchronization induced by spatially correlated noise
• Inference of hidden structures in complex physical systems by multi-scale clustering
• Emergence of cooperatively reorganizing cluster and super-Arrhenius dynamics of fragile supercooled liquids
• Growing length scale accompanying the vitrification: A perspective based on non-singular density fluctuations
• Potential-tuning molecular dynamics studies of fusion, and the question of ideal glassformers: (I) The Gay-Berne model
• Effective one-component model of binary mixture: molecular arrest induced by the spatially correlated stochastic dynamics
• Microscopic Theory of a Fluctuation-Induced Dynamical Crossover in Supercooled Liquids