On polydispersity and the hard-sphere glass transition

Abstract

We simulate the dynamics of polydisperse hard spheres at high packing fractions, $\varphi$, with an experimentally-realistic particle size distribution (PSD) and other commonly-used PSDs such as gaussian or top hat. We find that the mode of kinetic arrest depends on the PSD's shape and not only on its variance. For the experimentally-realistic PSD, the largest particles undergo an ideal glass transition at $\varphi \sim 0.588$ while the smallest particles remain mobile. Such species-specific localisation was previously observed only in asymmetric binary mixtures. Our findings suggest that the recent observation of ergodic behavior up to $\varphi \sim 0.6$ in a hard-sphere system is not evidence for activated dynamics, but an effect of polydispersity.