Questioning the relationship between the $\chi$4 susceptibility and the dynamical correlation length in a glass former

Abstract

Clusters of fast and slow correlated particles, identified as dynamical heterogeneities (DHs), con-stitute a central aspect of glassy dynamics. A key ingredient of the glass transition scenario is asignificant increase of the cluster size $\xi$4 as the transition is approached. In need of easy-to-computetools to measure $\xi$4 , the dynamical susceptibility $\chi$4 was introduced recently, and used in various ex-perimental works to probe DHs. Here, we investigate DHs in dense microgel suspensions using imagecorrelation analysis, and compute both $\chi$4 and the four-point correlation function G4 . The spatialdecrease of G4 provides a direct access to $\xi$4 , which is found to grow significantly with increasingvolume fraction. However, this increase is not captured by $\chi$4 . We show that the assumptions thatvalidate the connection between $\chi$4 and $\xi$4 are not fulfilled in our experiments.Comment: The present version was accepted for publication in Soft Matter (http://pubs.rsc.org/en/journals/journalissues/sm