Designing slower glasses by manipulating their local structure

2018/12/03 by Susana Marín Aguilar, Aguilar, Susana Marín, H. H. Wensink +5 · 2 citations
Engineering · #Advanced Optical Imaging Technologies #FOS: Physical sciences #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.00764

openalex publication_date 2018/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Glasses remain an elusive and poorly understood state of matter. For example, it is not clear how we can design an efficient macroscopic glass former by tuning the properties of its microscopic building blocks. In this paper, we propose a simple directional colloidal model that reinforces the optimal icosahedral local structure of binary hard-sphere glasses. We show that only this specific symmetry results in a dramatic slowing down of the dynamics. Our results open the door to controlling the dynamics of dense glassy systems by selectively promoting specific local structural environments.

Cited by

• Shear induced topological changes of local structure in dense colloidal suspensions
• Relationship between Structure and Dynamics of an Icosahedral Quasicrystal using Unsupervised Machine Learning

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