Correlation between temperature variations of static and dynamic properties in glass-forming liquids

D N Voylov; P J Griffin; B Mercado; J K Keum; M Nakanishi; V N Novikov; A P Sokolov

doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.94.060603

Correlation between temperature variations of static and dynamic properties in glass-forming liquids

Phys Rev E. 2016 Dec;94(6-1):060603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.060603. Epub 2016 Dec 29.

Authors

D N Voylov¹, P J Griffin², B Mercado³, J K Keum⁴, M Nakanishi⁵, V N Novikov¹, A P Sokolov^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, USA.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6272, USA.
³ Chemistry Department, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
⁴ Spallation Neutron Source, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.
⁵ Department of Electrical Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan.
⁶ Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.

PMID: 28085393
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.060603

Abstract

Detailed analysis of the static structure factor S(Q) in several glass-forming liquids reveals that the temperature variations of the width of the main diffraction peak ΔQ(T) correlate with the fragility of these liquids. This observation suggests a direct connection between rather subtle structural changes and sharp slowing down of structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids. We show that this observation can be rationalized using the Adam-Gibbs approach, through a connection between temperature variations of structural correlation length, l_{c}∼2π/ΔQ, and the size of cooperatively rearranging regions.