2005/12/16 by Ludovic Berthier, Giulio Biroli, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1120714
published as Science 310, 1797 (2005) · 5 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2005/12/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven experimentally, is that the dynamics becomes sluggish as the glass transition approaches because increasingly larger regions of the material have to move simultaneously to allow flow. We introduce new multipoint dynamical susceptibilities to estimate quantitatively the size of these regions and provide direct experimental evidence that the glass formation of molecular liquids and colloidal suspensions is accompanied by growing dynamic correlation length scales.