4 research outputs found
Growing Surface Tension of Amorphous-Amorphous Interfaces on Approaching the Colloidal Glass Transition
There is mounting evidence indicating that relaxation dynamics in liquids
approaching their glass transition not only becomes increasingly cooperative
(1,2) but the relaxing regions also become more compact in shape(3-7). While
the surface tension of the interface separating neighboring relaxing regions is
thought to play a crucial role in deciding both their size and
morphology(8-10), owing to the amorphous nature of these regions, even
identifying these interfaces has not been possible in bulk liquids. Here, by
devising a scheme to identify self-induced disorder sites in bulk colloidal
liquids, we directly quantified the dynamics of interfaces delineating regions
of high and low configurational overlap. This procedure also helped unveil a
non-monotonicity in dynamical correlations that has never been observed in bulk
supercooled liquids. Using the capillary fluctuation method (11,12), we
measured the surface tension of amorphous-amorphous interfaces with
supercooling and find that it increases rapidly across the mode-coupling area
fraction. Remarkably, a similar growth in the surface tension is also seen in
the presence of a pinned amorphous wall. Our observations help prune theories
of glass formation and opens up new research avenues aimed at tuning the
properties of amorphous-amorphous interfaces, and hence the glass itself, in a
manner analogous to grain boundary engineering in polycrystals (13)