TIFR Center for Interdisciplinary Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Narsingi, Hyderabad 500075, India.
Soft Matter. 2017 Oct 4;13(38):6929-6937. doi: 10.1039/c7sm01202k.
The existence and growth of amorphous order in supercooled liquids approaching glass transition is a subject of intense research. Even after decades of work, there is still no clear consensus on the molecular mechanisms that lead to a rapid slowing down of liquid dynamics approaching this putative transition. The existence of a correlation length associated with amorphous order has recently been postulated and has also been estimated using multi-point correlation functions which cannot be calculated easily in experiments. Thus the study of growing amorphous order remains mostly restricted to systems like colloidal glasses and simulations of model glass-forming liquids. In this work, we propose an experimentally realizable yet simple susceptibility to study the growth of amorphous order. We then demonstrate the validity of this approach for a few well-studied model supercooled liquids and obtain results which are consistent with other conventional methods.
过冷液体中无定形有序的存在和增长是一个研究热点。尽管已经进行了几十年的研究，但对于导致液体动力学在接近所谓转变时迅速减慢的分子机制，仍然没有明确的共识。最近有人假设存在与无定形有序相关的相关长度，并使用多点相关函数对其进行了估计，而这些函数在实验中不易计算。因此，对无定形有序增长的研究主要限于胶体玻璃和模型玻璃形成液体的模拟。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种可实验实现但简单的敏感性来研究无定形有序的增长。然后，我们证明了这种方法对于一些经过充分研究的模型过冷液体的有效性，并得到了与其他传统方法一致的结果。
