0000000000294250
AUTHOR
Peter Scheidler
Growing length scales in a supercooled liquid close to an interface
We present the results of molecular dynamics computer simulations of a simple glass former close to an interface between the liquid and the frozen amorphous phase of the same material. By investigating F_s(q,z,t), the incoherent intermediate scattering function for particles that have a distance z from the wall, we show that the relaxation dynamics of the particles close to the wall is much slower than the one for particles far away from the wall. For small z the typical relaxation time for F_s(q,z,t) increases like exp(Delta/(z-z_p)), where Delta and z_p are constants. We use the location of the crossover from this law to the bulk behavior to define a first length scale tilde{z}. A differe…
The relaxation dynamics of a supercooled liquid confined by rough walls
We present the results of molecular dynamics computer simulations of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined between two parallel rough walls. These walls are realized by frozen amorphous configurations of the same liquid and therefore the structural properties of the confined fluid are identical to the ones of the bulk system. Hence this setup allows us to study how the relaxation dynamics is affected by the pure effect of confinement, i.e. if structural changes are completely avoided. We find that the local relaxation dynamics is a strong function of z, the distance of the particles from the wall, and that close to the surface the typical relaxation times are orders of magnitude larger tha…
Static and dynamical properties of a supercooled liquid confined in a pore
We present the results of a Molecular Dynamics computer simulation of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined in a narrow pore. The surface of the pore has an amorphous structure similar to that of the confined liquid. We find that the static properties of the liquid are not affected by the confinement, while the dynamics changes dramatically. By investigating the time and temperature dependence of the intermediate scattering function we show that the dynamics of the particles close to the center of the tube is similar to the one in the bulk, whereas the characteristic relaxation time tau_q(T,rho) of the intermediate scattering function at wavevector q and distance rho from the axis of the p…
The relaxation dynamics of a simple glass former confined in a pore
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined in a narrow pore. We find that the average dynamics is strongly influenced by the confinement in that time correlation functions are much more stretched than in the bulk. By investigating the dynamics of the particles as a function of their distance from the wall, we can show that this stretching is due to a strong dependence of the relaxation time on this distance, i.e. that the dynamics is spatially very heterogeneous. In particular we find that the typical relaxation time of the particles close to the wall is orders of magnitude larger than the one of particles …
Cooperative motion and growing length scales in supercooled confined liquids
Using molecular dynamics simulations we investigate the relaxation dynamics of a supercooled liquid close to a rough as well as close to a smooth wall. For the former situation the relaxation times increase strongly with decreasing distance from the wall whereas in the second case they strongly decrease. We use this dependence to extract various dynamical length scales and show that they grow with decreasing temperature. By calculating the frequency dependent average susceptibility of such confined systems we show that the experimental interpretation of such data is very difficult.
Influence of Confining Walls on the Dynamics of Supercooled Simple Liquids
The relaxation dynamics of supercooled liquids in the bulk shows many features that are not seen in the dynamics of liquids at elevated temperatures, such as a very slow decay of the time-correlation functions, stretching, etc. The dynamics of liquids that are close to a surface (free space, confining wall, etc.) is even more complex in that the stretching is increased and in that there is evidence for the presence of multiple time scales. In this paper we review some results of recent molecular dynamics computer simulations in which we investigated the dynamics of a simple glass forming liquid in the vicinity of a wall. Two types of walls axe studied: A rough one and a smooth one. We find …