Front propagation versus bulk relaxation in the annealing dynamics of a kinetically constrained model of ultrastable glasses

Abstract

Glasses prepared by physical vapour deposition have been shown to be remarkably more stable than those prepared by standard cooling protocols, with properties that appear to be similar to systems aged for extremely long times. When subjected to a rapid rise in temperature, ultrastable glasses anneal towards the liquid in a qualitatively different manner than ordinary glasses, with the seeming competition of different timescales and lengthscales. We numerically reproduce the phenomenology of ultrastable glass annealing with a kinetically constrained model, a three dimensional East model with soft constraints, in a setting where the bulk is in an ultrastable configuration and a free surface is permanently excited. Annealing towards the liquid state is given by the competition between the ballistic propagation of a front from the free surface and a much slower nucleation-like relaxation in the bulk. The crossover between these mechanisms also explains the change in behaviour with film thickness seen experimentally.

8 pages, 3 figures

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• Two-step devitrification of ultrastable glasses
• Front-mediated melting of ultrastable glasses
• Front propagation in ultrastable glasses is dynamically heterogeneous
• How do interfaces alter the dynamics of supercooled water?
• Accelerated relaxation and suppressed dynamic heterogeneity in a kinetically constrained (East) model with swaps
• Dynamical Facilitation Governs the Equilibration Dynamics of Glasses
• Quench dynamics of a dissipative Rydberg gas in the classical and quantum regime
• Study of the upper-critical dimension of the East model through the breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relation
• Revealing emergent many-body phenomena by analyzing large-scale space-time records of monitored quantum systems