2009/02/24 by Sarika Maitra Bhattacharyya, Biman Bagchi, Bhattacharyya, Sarika Maitra +3
Environmental Science · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0902.4078
15 pages and 5 figures, minor changes in the content
openalex publication_date 2009/02/24 · arxiv created 2009/03/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As a liquid is progressively supercooled an intriguing weakening of the wavenumber (q) dependence of the structural relaxation time τ(q) in the large q limit is observed both in experiments and simulation studies. Neither the continuous Brownian diffusive dynamics nor the discontinuous activated events can alone explain the anomalous wavenumber dependence. Here we use our recently developed theory that unifies the mode coupling theory (MCT) for continuous dynamics and the random first order transition theory (RFOT) treatment of activated discontinuous motion as a nucleation (instanton) process, to understand the wavenumber dependence of density relaxation. The predicted smooth change in mechanism of relaxation from diffusive to activated, in the crossover regime, is wavevector dependent and is eventually responsible for sub-quadratic, almost linear, q dependence of the relaxation time.