Influence of an amorphous wall on the distribution of localized excitations in a colloidal glass-forming liquid

Gokhale, Shreyas and Nagamanasa, Hima K and Sood, AK and Ganapathy, Rajesh (2016) Influence of an amorphous wall on the distribution of localized excitations in a colloidal glass-forming liquid. In: JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS-THEORY AND EXPERIMENT .

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Abstract

Elucidating the nature of the glass transition has been the holy grail of condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics for several decades. A phenomenological aspect that makes glass formation a conceptually formidable problem is that structural and dynamic correlations in glass-forming liquids are too subtle to be captured at the level of conventional two-point functions. As a consequence, a host of theoretical techniques, such as quenched amorphous configurations of particles, have been devised and employed in simulations and colloid experiments to gain insights into the mechanisms responsible for these elusive correlations. Very often, though, the analysis of spatio-temporal correlations is performed in the context of a single theoretical framework, and critical comparisons of microscopic predictions of competing theories are thereby lacking. Here, we address this issue by analysing the distribution of localized excitations, which are building blocks of relaxation as per the dynamical facilitation (DF) theory, in the presence of an amorphous wall, a construct motivated by the random first-order transition theory (RFOT). We observe that spatial profiles of the concentration of excitations exhibit complex features such as non-monotonicity and oscillations. Moreover, the smoothly varying part of the concentration profile yields a length scale xi(c,)which we compare with a previously computed length scale xi(dyn.) Our results suggest a method to assess the role of dynamical facilitation in governing structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS-THEORY AND EXPERIMENT
Additional Information:	Copy right for this article belongs to the IOP PUBLISHING LTD, TEMPLE CIRCUS, TEMPLE WAY, BRISTOL BS1 6BE, ENGLAND
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2016 10:20
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2016 10:20
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/55106

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