Equilibrium ultrastable glasses produced by random pinning

Abstract

Ultrastable glasses have risen to prominence due to their potentially useful material properties and the tantalizing possibility of a general method of preparation via vapor deposition. Despite the importance of this novel class of amorphous materials, numerical studies have been scarce because achieving ultrastability in atomistic simulations is an enormous challenge. Here we bypass this difficulty and establish that randomly pinning the position of a small fraction of particles inside an equilibrated supercooled liquid generates ultrastable configurations at essentially no numerical cost, while avoiding undesired structural changes due to the preparation protocol. Building on the analogy with vapor-deposited ultrastable glasses, we study the melting kinetics of these configurations following a sudden temperature jump into the liquid phase. In homogeneous geometries, we find that enhanced kinetic stability is accompanied by large scale dynamic heterogeneity, while a competition between homogeneous and heterogeneous melting is observed when a liquid boundary invades the glass at constant velocity. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale, atomistically resolved, and experimentally relevant simulations of the kinetics of ultrastable glasses.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (25)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Scaling behavior in the $\beta$-relaxation regime of a supercooled Lennard-Jones mixture
• Dynamics on the Way to Forming Glass: Bubbles in Space-time
• On the Adam-Gibbs-Wolynes scenario for the viscosity increase in glasses
• Fragilities of Liquids Predicted from the Random First Order Transition Theory of Glasses
• Ideal Glass Transitions by Random Pinning
• Static point-to-set correlations in glass-forming liquids
• On the surface of glasses
• Hiding Quiet Solutions in Random Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• Probing a liquid to glass transition in equilibrium
• Geometrical Frustration and Static Correlations in a Simple Glass Former
• Growing Dynamical Facilitation on Approaching the Random Pinning Colloidal Glass Transition
• Macroscopic Facilitation of Glassy Relaxation Kinetics: Ultra Stable Glass Films with Front-Like Thermal Response
• Model Vapor-Deposited Glasses: Growth Front and Composition Effects
• Direct Estimate of the Static Length-Scale Accompanying the Glass Transition
• Preparation and relaxation of very stable glassy states of a simulated liquid
• Random Pinning Glass Transition: Hallmarks, Mean-Field Theory and Renormalization Group Analysis
• Random pinning in glassy spin models with plaquette interactions
• Statistical mechanics of homogeneous partly pinned fluid systems
• Glassy dynamics as a melting process (On melting dynamics and the glass transition, Part II)
• Dynamical correlations in a glass-former with randomly pinned particles
• Glassy aspects of melting dynamics (On melting dynamics and the glass transition, Part I)
• A general approach to systems with randomly pinned particles: unfolding and clarifying the Random Pinning Glass Transition
• Investigating amorphous order in stable glasses by random pinning
• A small subset of normal modes mimics the properties of dynamical heterogeneity in a model supercooled liquid

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Statistical physics of inference: Thresholds and algorithms
• Growing timescales and lengthscales characterizing vibrations of amorphous solids
• Evidence for a disordered critical point in a glass-forming liquid
• Numerical detection of the Gardner transition in a mean-field glass former
• Deconstructing the glass transition through critical experiments on colloids
• Age and Structure of a Model Vapor-Deposited Glass
• Density controls the kinetic stability of ultrastable glasses
• Two-step devitrification of ultrastable glasses
• The melting of stable glasses is governed by nucleation-and-growth dynamics
• Front-mediated melting of ultrastable glasses
• Creating bulk ultrastable glasses by random particle bonding
• Front propagation versus bulk relaxation in the annealing dynamics of a kinetically constrained model of ultrastable glasses
• Computer simulations of the glass transition and glassy materials
• Front propagation in ultrastable glasses is dynamically heterogeneous
• Dynamical Facilitation Governs the Equilibration Dynamics of Glasses
• Kinetic stability and energetics of simulated glasses created by constant pressure cooling
• Computational Methods toward Ultrastable Glasses