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Slowing down supercooled liquids by manipulating their local structure
How do we design particles with interactions capable of inducing a more efficient glassy dynamics in supercooled liquids ? While it is well understood that glassy dynamics are accompanied by the emergence of long-lived locally favoured structures (1,2), it is not clear how the such structures can be designed to facilitate dynamical arrest. Here, we present a simple directional attractive colloidal model capable of templating the local structure of binary hard-sphere glasses. While discussing its glassy properties, we show that only few specific symmetry results in a dramatic slowing down of the dynamics (3). Our results open the door to controlling the dynamics of dense glassy systems by selectively promoting specific local structural environments. The extension of these results to traditional isotropic glass former will be also discussed (4).
1. Tarjus G, Kivelson SA, Nussinov Z, Viot P (2005) J. Phys. : Condens. Matter 17(50):R1143.
2. C. Patrick Royall, Stephen R. Williams (2015) Phys. Rep. 560, 1
3. S. Marín Aguilar, Henricus H. Wensink, G. Foffi, F. Smallenburg Soft Matter (2019)
4. S. Marín Aguilar, H. H. Wensink, G. Foffi, F. Smallenburg, PRL (2020)