Binary mixture of hard disks as a model glass former: Caging and uncaging

I have proposed a measure for the cage effect in glass forming systems. A binary mixture of hard disks is numerically studied as a model glass former. A network is constructed on the basis of the colliding pairs of disks. A rigidity matrix is formed from the isostatic (rigid) sub--network, corresponding to a cage. The determinant of the matrix changes its sign when an uncaging event occurs. Time evolution of the number of the uncaging events is determined numerically. I have found that there is a gap in the uncaging timescales between the cages involving different numbers of disks. Caging of one disk by two neighboring disks sustains for a longer time as compared with other cages involving more than one disk. This gap causes two--step relaxation of this system

Formation of chiral CO polyhedral crystals on icy interstellar grains

The crystallinity and morphology of solid carbon monoxide (CO) on icy interstellar grains were examined by observing the deposition, crystallization, and UV and electrons irradiation of solid CO using transmission electron microscopy. Herein, we found that solid CO deposited in molecular clouds was crystalline, and that even if amorphous CO was deposited, amorphous CO crystallized within 10(3) yr at 10 K. Conversely, crystalline CO was not amorphized by UV rays or electron beam at 10 K. These results indicated the occurrence of chiral crystalline CO instead of amorphous CO in space. Furthermore, the large surface diffusion coefficients of CO on eamorphous H2O and crystalline CO at 10 K facilitated the morphological equilibration of crystalline CO. Bad wetting of crystalline CO with amorphous H2O proved that the morphology of the ice grains was not spherical with an onion-like structure, as hitherto assumed, but rather it was a polyhedral crystalline CO attached to amorphous H2O. This has important implications for phenomena associated with the collision and subsequent sticking between ice grains, surface chemical reactions, non-thermal desorption of molecules and the origin of homochirality in interstellar biomolecules