articleScienceDec 15, 2005GREEN OA

Direct Experimental Evidence of a Growing Length Scale Accompanying the Glass Transition

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique · Université de Montpellier · +5 more institutions

PubMed
Indexed inarxivcrossrefpubmed

Abstract

Understanding glass formation is a challenge, because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven experimentally, is that the dynamics becomes sluggish as the glass transition approaches, because increasingly larger regions of the material have to move simultaneously to allow flow. We introduce new multipoint dynamical susceptibilities to estimate quantitatively the size of these regions and provide direct experimental evidence that the glass formation of molecular liquids and colloidal suspensions is accompanied by growing dynamic correlation length scales.

Citation impact

807
total citations
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27.80
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100%
References
34
Citations per year

Authors

8

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Glass transition
  • Chemical physics
  • Length scale
  • Colloid
  • Dynamical heterogeneity
  • Flow (mathematics)
  • Scale (ratio)
  • Materials science
UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Sustainable cities and communities
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