2006/10/06 by Eric R Weeks, Eric R. Weeks, John C. Crocker +3 · 5 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0953-8984/19/20/205131
published as J. Phys.: Cond. Mat. 19, 205131 (2007) · Submitted to J Phys: Cond Mat; for Workshop on Nonequilibrium Phenomena in Glasses (Pisa, September 2006)
arxiv created 2006/10/06 · openalex publication_date 2007/04/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We use a confocal microscope to examine the motion of individual particles in a dense colloidal suspension. Close to the glass transition, particle motion is strongly spatially correlated. The correlations decay exponentially with particle separation, yielding a dynamic length scale of O(2-3 sigma) (in terms of particle diameter sigma). This length scale grows modestly as the glass transition is approached. Further, the correlated motion exhibits a strong spatial dependence on the pair correlation function g(r). Motion within glassy samples is weakly correlated, but with a larger spatial scale for this correlation.