Johari-Goldstein relaxation far below Tg: Experimental evidence for the Gardner transition in structural glasses?

Abstract

Experimental evidence for the Gardner transition, theoretically predicted to arise deep in the glassy state of matter, is scarce. At this transition, the energy landscape sensed by the particles forming the glass is expected to become more complex. In the present work, we report the dielectric response of two typical glass formers with well-pronounced Johari-Goldstein beta relaxation following this response down to unprecedented low temperatures, far below the glass transition. As the Johari-Goldstein process is believed to arise from the local structure of the energy landscape, its investigation seems an ideal tool to seek evidence for the Gardner transition. Indeed, we find an unusual broadening of the beta relaxation below TG ~ 110 K for sorbitol and TG ~ 100 K for xylitol, in excess of the expected broadening arising from a distribution of energy barriers. Thus, these results provide hints at the presence of the Gardner transition in canonical structural glass formers.

arXiv comment6 pages, 3 figures + 2 pages, 3 figures in Supplemental Material

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• Hierarchical landscape of hard disk glasses
• Morphology of renormalization-group flow for the de Almeida-Thouless-Gardner universality class
• Thermodynamic-Dynamic Interrelations in Glass-Forming Polymer Fluids
• Determining the nonequilibrium criticality of a Gardner transition via a hybrid study of molecular simulations and machine learning
• Experimental observation of the marginal glass phase in a colloidal glass
• Johari-Goldstein $\beta$ relaxation in glassy dynamics originates from two-scale energy landscape
• How to count in hierarchical landscapes: a 'full' solution to mean-field complexity
• The glass transition in molecules, colloids and grains: universality and specificity
• Impact of jamming criticality on low-temperature anomalies in structural glasses
• Searching for the Gardner transition in glassy glycerol
• Intra- and Intermolecular Inhomogeneities in the Course of Glassy Densification of Polyalcohols
• Numerical test of the replica-symmetric Hamiltonian for the correlations of the critical state of spin glasses in a field
• Dynamic Gardner crossover in a simple structural glass