2018/01/01 by Beatriz Seoane, Francesco Zamponi
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Colloid #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Glass transition #Hard spheres #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Phase (matter) #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Phase transition #Physical chemistry #Physics #Polymer #Spin glass #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1039/c8sm00859k
published as Soft Matter, 2018, 14, 5222 - 5234 · 13 pages, 12 figures (two figures added and one extra Appendix section)
openalex publication_date 2018/01/01 · arxiv created 2018/05/25 · arxiv updated 2018/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for colloidal or granular glasses. Deep inside the glass phase, we find that a sharp crossover pressure PG separates two distinct dynamical regimes. For pressure P < PG, the glass behaves as a normal solid, displaying fast dynamics that quickly equilibrate within the glass free energy basin. For P > PG, instead, the dynamics become strongly anomalous, displaying very large equilibration timescales, aging, and a constantly increasing dynamical susceptibility. The crossover at PG is strongly reminiscent of the one observed in three-dimensional spin-glasses in an external field, suggesting that the two systems could be in the same universality class, consistent with theoretical expectations.