The structural origin of the hard-sphere glass transition in granular packing

Abstract

Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest is associated with the growth of a certain static order. Using granular packing as a model hard-sphere glass, we show the glass transition as a thermodynamic phase transition with a "hidden" polytetrahedral order. This polytetrahedral order is spatially correlated with the slow dynamics. It is geometrically frustrated and has a peculiar fractal dimension. Additionally, as the packing fraction increases, its growth follows an entropy-driven nucleation process, similar to that of the random first-order transition theory. Our study essentially identifies a long-sought-after structural glass order in hard-sphere glasses.

References in corpus (32)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Theory of Structural Glasses and Supercooled Liquids
• Mean field theory of hard sphere glasses and jamming
• Colloidal Gels: Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Routes
• Fractal free energy landscapes in structural glasses
• Properties of cage rearrangements observed near the colloidal glass transition
• Effects of compression on the vibrational modes of marginally jammed solids
• The frustration-based approach of supercooled liquids and the glass transition: a review and critical assessment
• Thermodynamic signature of growing amorphous order in glass-forming liquids
• Shortcomings of the Bond Orientational Order Parameters for the Analysis of Disordered Particulate Matter
• Roles of icosahedral and crystal-like order in hard spheres glass transition
• The Shapes of Cooperatively Rearranging Regions in Glass Forming Liquids
• The Relationship of Dynamical Heterogeneity to the Adam-Gibbs and Random First-Order Transition Theories of Glass Formation
• Unified study of glass and jamming rheology in soft particle systems
• Jamming transitions in amorphous packings of frictionless spheres occur over a continuous range of volume fractions
• Why is Random Close Packing Reproducible?
• Jamming versus Glass Transitions
• The building blocks of dynamical heterogeneities in dense granular media
• Critical scaling and heterogeneous superdiffusion across the jamming/rigidity transition of a granular glass
• Numerical calculation of granular entropy
• Following the evolution of glassy states under external perturbations: compression and shear-strain
• Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics of dense granular media
• Equivalence of glass transition and colloidal glass transition in the hard-sphere limit
• Entropy of jammed matter
• Direct determination of the size of basins of attraction of jammed solids
• Geometrical Frustration and Static Correlations in Hard-Sphere Glass Formers
• Correlations of Structure and Dynamics in an Aging Colloidal Glass
• The Jamming point street-lamp in the world of granular media
• Edwards thermodynamics of the jamming transition for frictionless packings: ergodicity test and role of angoricity and compactivity
• Probing ergodicity in granular matter
• Non-equilibrium thermodynamics in sheared hard-sphere materials
• Devising a protocol-related statistical mechanics framework for granular materials

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Granular materials flow like complex fluids
• Structural and Topological Nature of Plasticity in Sheared Granular Materials
• Analyzing X-Ray tomographies of granular packings
• Slow dynamics in a quasi-two-dimensional binary complex plasma
• Experimental Test on Edwards Volume Ensemble of Tapped Granular Packings
• Tetrahedrality dictates dynamics in hard spheres
• Role of attractive forces in the relaxation dynamics of supercooled liquids
• Echoes of the glass transition in athermal soft spheres
• Origin of Non-cubic Scaling Law in Disordered Granular Packing
• Ordering and dimensional crossovers in metallic glasses and liquids
• Characterization of Anisotropic Gaussian Random Fields by Minkowski Tensors
• Brownian motion of ellipsoidal particles on a granular magnetic bath
• A neutron tomography study: probing the spontaneous crystallization of randomly packed granular assemblies
• Granular packing as model glass formers
• Correlation between plastic rearrangements and local structure in a cyclically driven glass
• Granular Segregation Mechanisms by Cyclic Shear