The Ultimate Fate of Supercooled Liquids

Abstract

In recent years it has become widely accepted that a dynamical length scale ξ_α plays an important role in supercooled liquids near the glass transition. We examine the implications of the interplay between the growing ξ_α and the size of the crystal nucleus, ξ_M, which shrinks on cooling. We argue that at low temperatures where ξ_α > ξ_M a new crystallization mechanism emerges enabling rapid development of a large scale web of sparsely connected crystallinity. Though we predict this web percolates the system at too low a temperature to be easily seen in the laboratory, there are noticeable residual effects near the glass transition that can account for several previously observed unexplained phenomena of deeply supercooled liquids including Fischer clusters, and anomalous crystal growth near T_g.

References in corpus (3)

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• On the surface of glasses
• Constructing explicit magnetic analogies for the dynamics of glass forming liquids

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Theory of the Structural Glass Transition: A Pedagogical Review
• A new view of the Lindemann criterion
• Crystallisation Instability in Glassforming Mixtures
• From compact to fractal crystalline clusters in concentrated systems of monodisperse hard spheres
• Ultrafast spherulitic crystal growth as a stress-induced phenomenon specific of fragile glass-formers
• Three simple scenarios for high-dimensional sphere packings
• Phenomenological model of supercooled liquid as a possible resolution of the Kauzmann paradox
• Ageing and crystallization in a lattice glass model
• Direct observation of crystal nucleation and growth in a quasi-two-dimensional nonvibrating granular system