Slowing down supercooled liquids by manipulating their local structure.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31799588.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1039/c9sm01746a.
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Abstract
Glasses remain an elusive and poorly understood state of matter. It is not clear how we can control the macroscopic dynamics of glassy systems by tuning the properties of their microscopic building blocks. In this paper, we propose a simple directional colloidal model that reinforces the optimal icosahedral local structure of binary hard-sphere glasses. We show that this specific symmetry results in a dramatic slowing down of the dynamics. Our results open the door to controlling the dynamics of dense glassy systems by selectively promoting specific local structural environments.