Two distinct time scales in the dynamics of a dense hard-sphere liquid

Dasgupta, Chandan and Vails, Oriol T (1994) Two distinct time scales in the dynamics of a dense hard-sphere liquid. In: Physical Review E, 50 (5). pp. 3916-3924.

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Abstract

The dynamic behavior of a dense hard-sphere liquid is studied by numerically integrating a set of Langevin equations that incorporate a free energy functional of the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff form. At relatively low densities, the system remains, during the time scale of our simulation, in the neighborhood of the metastable local minimum of the free energy that represents a uniform liquid. At higher densities, the system is found to fluctuate near the uniform liquid minimum for a characteristic period of time before making a transition to an inhomogeneous minimum of the free energy. The time that the system spends in the vicinity of the liquid minimum before making a transition to another one defines a new time scale of the dynamics. This time scale is found to decrease sharply as the density is increased above a characteristic value. Implications of these observations on the interpretation of experimental and numerical data on the dynamics of supercooled liquids are discussed.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Physical Review E
Publisher:	American physical society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to American physical society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	18 Sep 2006
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:31
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/8645

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