Connecting short and long time dynamics in hard-sphere-like colloidal glasses

Abstract

Glass-forming materials are characterized by an intermittent motion at the microscopic scale. Particles spend most of their time rattling within the cages formed by their neighbors, and seldom jump to a different cage. In molecular glass formers the temperature dependence of the jump features, such as the average caging time and jump length, characterizes the relaxation processes and allows for a short-time prediction of the diffusivity. Here we experimentally investigate the cage-jump motion of a two-dimensional hard-sphere-like colloidal suspension, where the volume fraction is the relevant parameter controlling the slowing down of the dynamics. We characterize the volume fraction dependence of the cage-jump features and show that, as in molecular systems, they allow for a short time prediction of the diffusivity.

5 pages, 6 figures, Soft Matter 2015

References in corpus (6)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Excitation lines and the breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relations in supercooled liquids
• Lengthscale dependence of dynamic four-point susceptibilities in glass formers
• Avalanches mediate crystallization in a hard-sphere glass
• Tracking heterogeneous dynamics during the alpha-relaxation of a simple glass-former
• Energy-landscape network approach to the glass transition

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Dynamic phase coexistence in glass-forming liquids
• Cage Size and Jump Precursors in Glass-Forming Liquids: Experiment and Simulations
• Concentrated suspensions of Brownian beads in water: dynamic heterogeneities trough a simple experimental technique
• Dynamic heterogeneity in an orientational glass