2002/09/05 by Rachel E. Courtland, Rachel Courtland, Eric R. Weeks
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0953-8984/15/1/349
published as J. Phys. Cond. Mat.,_15_, S359-S365 (2003) · submitted to proceedings for Liquid Matter Conference 2002
arxiv created 2002/09/05 · openalex publication_date 2002/12/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the dynamics of ageing colloidal glasses. We prepare a colloidal suspension at high density, a simple model system that shares many properties with other glasses, and initiate experiments by stirring the sample. We follow the motion of several thousand colloidal particles after the stirring and observe that their motion significantly slows as the sample ages. The ageing is both spatially and temporally heterogeneous. Furthermore, while the characteristic relaxation timescale grows with the age of the sample, nontrivial particle motions continue to occur on all timescales.