Abstract
The viscosity of glass-forming liquids increases by many orders of magnitude if their temperature is lowered by a mere factor of 2–3. Recent studies suggest that this widespread phenomenon is accompanied by spatially heterogeneous dynamics, and a growing dynamic correlation length quantifying the extent of correlated particle motion. Here we use a novel numerical method to detect and quantify spatial correlations that reveal a surprising non-monotonic temperature evolution of spatial dynamical correlations, accompanied by a second length scale that grows monotonically and has a very different nature. Our results directly unveil a dramatic qualitative change in atomic motions near the mode-coupling crossover temperature, which involves no fitting or indirect theoretical interpretation. These findings impose severe new constraints on the theoretical description of the glass transition, and open several research perspectives, in particular for experiments, to confirm and quantify our observations in real materials.
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Acknowledgements
We thank G. Biroli and A. Cavagna for fruitful exchanges about this work. We acknowlege the financial support from the Région Languedoc-Roussillon (L.B.), ANR DYNHET (L.B. and W.K.), and MICINN (Project: MAT2009-13155-C04-02) and Junta de Andalucía (Project: P07-FQM-02496) (S.R-V.). W.K. is a member of the Institut universitaire de France.
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L.B., W.K. and S.R-V. contributed to the computer simulations, the analysis of the data, and the writing of the paper.
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Kob, W., Roldán-Vargas, S. & Berthier, L. Non-monotonic temperature evolution of dynamic correlations in glass-forming liquids. Nature Phys 8, 164–167 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2133
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2133
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