Displacement correlations in a two-dimensional colloidal liquid and their relationship with shear strain correlations

Abstract

Correlations of the displacement field in a two-dimensional model colloidal liquid is studied numerically and analytically. By calculating the displacement correlations and the shear strain correlations from the numerical data of particle simulations, the displacement field is shown to have nontrivial correlations, even in liquids that are only slightly glassy with the area fraction as low as 0.5. It is suggested analytically and demonstrated numerically that the displacement correlations are more informative than the shear correlations: the former behaves logarithmically with regard to the spatial distance at shorter scales, while the corresponding information is missing from the shear correlations. The logarithmic behavior of the displacement correlations is interpreted as manifesting a long-lived aspect of the cage effect.

24 pages, 15 figures; to be published in Physical Review E

References in corpus (8)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Anomalous hydrodynamic interaction in a quasi-two-dimensional suspension
• Emergence of long-ranged stress correlations at the liquid to glass transition
• Relationship between bond-breakage correlations and four-point correlations in heterogeneous glassy dynamics: Configuration changes and vibration modes
• Thermal fluctuations, mechanical response, and hyperuniformity in jammed solids
• Long-range spatial correlations of particle displacements and the emergence of elasticity
• Unexpected thermo-elastic effects in liquid glycerol by mechanical deformation
• Solidity of viscous liquids. V. Long-wavelength dominance of the dynamics