6533b7cffe1ef96bd1257c77
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Dynamical coexistence in moderately polydisperse hard-sphere glasses
Matteo CampoThomas Specksubject
PhysicsPhase transition010304 chemical physicsStatistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)General Physics and AstronomyFOS: Physical sciencesDisordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn)Renormalization groupCondensed Matter - Disordered Systems and Neural NetworksComputational Physics (physics.comp-ph)010402 general chemistryScaling theory01 natural sciencesLocal structureDirected percolation0104 chemical sciencesMolecular dynamicsCritical point (thermodynamics)0103 physical sciencesStatistical physicsPhysical and Theoretical ChemistryScalingPhysics - Computational PhysicsCondensed Matter - Statistical Mechanicsdescription
We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are generated by event-driven molecular dynamics. We show that these trajectories can be characterized in terms of the local structure, and we find a dynamical-structural (active-inactive) phase transition between two dynamical phases: one dominated by liquidlike trajectories with a low degree of local order and one dominated by glassylike trajectories with a high degree of local order. We show that both phases coexist and are separated by a spatiotemporal interface. Sampling exceptionally long trajectories allows us to perform a systematic finite-size scaling analysis. We find excellent agreement with Binder’s scaling theory for first-order transitions. Interestingly, the coexistence region narrows at higher densities, supporting the idea of a critical point controlling the dynamic arrest. Scaling of the susceptibility suggests that the critical behavior falls into the universality class of directed percolation in 3 + 1 dimensions.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-01-10 |