Metastable Dynamics of the Hard-Sphere System

Abstract

The reformulation of the mode-coupling theory (MCT) of the liquid-glass transition which incorporates the element of metastability is applied to the hard-sphere system. It is shown that the glass transition in this system is not a sharp one at the special value of the density or the packing fraction, which is in contrast to the prediction by the conventional MCT. Instead we find that the slowing down of the dynamics occurs over a range of values of the packing fraction. Consequently, the exponents governing the sequence of time relaxations in the intermediate time regime are given as functions of packing fraction with one additional parameter which describes the overall scale of the metastable potential energy for defects in the hard-sphere system. Implications of the present model on the recent experiments on colloidal systems are also discussed.

21 pages, 5 figures (available upon request), RevTEX3.0, JFI Preprint#

References in corpus (3)

• Density nonlinearities and a field theory for the dynamics of simple fluids
• Metastable Dynamics above the Glass Transition
• Metastability, Mode Coupling and the Glass Transition

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Molecular dynamics simulations of crystallization of hard spheres
• Structural and Thermodynamic Properties of Hard-Sphere Fluids
• Equilibrium equation of state of a hard sphere binary mixture at very large densities using replica exchange Monte-Carlo simulations
• On the liquid-glass transition line in monatomic Lennard-Jones fluids
• Estimation of critical exponents from the cluster coefficients: Application to hard spheres
• Transport coefficients at Metastable Densities from models of Generalized Hydrodynamics