2012/11/30 by Patrick Charbonneau, Gilles Tarjus
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.87.042305
published as Phys. Rev. E 87, 042305 (2013) · 8 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2013/04/03 · arxiv updated 2013/04/16
We show that in the equilibrium phase of glass-forming hard-sphere fluids in three dimensions, the static length scales tentatively associated with the dynamical slowdown and the dynamical length characterizing spatial heterogeneities in the dynamics unambiguously decorrelate. The former grow at a much slower rate than the latter when density increases. This observation is valid for the dynamical range that is accessible to computer simulations, which roughly corresponds to that of colloidal experiments. We also find that in this same range, no one-to-one correspondence between relaxation time and point-to-set correlation length exists. These results point to the coexistence of several relaxation mechanisms in the accessible dynamical regime of three-dimensional hard-sphere glass formers.