Activity statistics in a colloidal glass former: experimental evidence for a dynamical transition

Abstract

In a dense colloidal suspension at a volume fraction slightly lower than that of its glass transition, we follow the trajectories of an assembly of tracers over a large time window. We define a local activity, which quantifies the local tendency of the system to rearrange. We determine the statistics of the time and space integrated activity, and we argue that it develops a low activity tail that comes on a par with the onset of glassy behavior and heterogeneous dynamics. These rare events may be interpreted as the reflection of an underlying dynamic phase transition.

20 pages, 16 figures

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• Dynamical criticality in open systems: non-perturbative physics, microscopic origin and direct observation
• Modeling non-linear dielectric susceptibilities of supercooled molecular liquids
• Dynamical phase transition in the activity-biased fully-connected random field Ising model: connection with glass-forming systems