Issue 46, 2018

Two-time correlations for probing the aging dynamics of glassy colloids

Abstract

We present results for the aging dynamics of a dense 2D colloidal system obtained with molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, systems are quenched to densities far above the glass transition with relaxation time scales that used to be prohibitive for such a comprehensive study. We performed extensive simulations to gather detailed statistics about rare rearrangement events. With a simple criterion for identifying irreversible events based on Voronoi tessellations, we find that the rate of those events decelerates hyperbolically. We track the probability density function for particle displacements, the van-Hove function, with sufficient statistics as to reveal its two-time dependence that is indicative of aging. Those displacements, measured from a waiting time tw after the quench up to times t, exhibit a data collapse as a function of t/tw. These findings can be explained comprehensively as manifestations of record dynamics, i.e., a relaxation dynamic driven by record-breaking fluctuations. We show that an on-lattice model of a colloid that was built on record dynamics indeed reproduces the experimental results in great detail.

Graphical abstract: Two-time correlations for probing the aging dynamics of glassy colloids

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
26 Oct 2018
Accepted
04 Nov 2018
First published
14 Nov 2018

Soft Matter, 2018,14, 9451-9456

Author version available

Two-time correlations for probing the aging dynamics of glassy colloids

D. Robe and S. Boettcher, Soft Matter, 2018, 14, 9451 DOI: 10.1039/C8SM02191K

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