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Measurements of growing surface tension of amorphous–amorphous interfaces on approaching the colloidal glass transition

Divya Ganapathi,Hima K Nagamanasa,A. Sood,R. Ganapathy

Published 2017 in Nature Communications

ABSTRACT

There is mounting evidence indicating that relaxation dynamics in liquids approaching their glass transition not only become increasingly cooperative, but the relaxing regions also become more compact in shape. Of the many theories of the glass transition, only the random first-order theory—a thermodynamic framework—anticipates the surface tension of relaxing regions to play a role in deciding both their size and morphology. However, owing to the amorphous nature of the relaxing regions, even the identification of their interfaces has not been possible in experiments hitherto. Here, we devise a method to directly quantify the dynamics of amorphous–amorphous interfaces in bulk supercooled colloidal liquids. Our procedure also helped unveil a non-monotonic evolution in dynamical correlations with supercooling in bulk liquids. We measure the surface tension of the interfaces and show that it increases rapidly across the mode-coupling area fraction. Our experiments support a thermodynamic origin of the glass transition. The existence of interfaces, separating distinct relaxing regions, has been predicted in glass theory, but a direct proof remains challenging due to the amorphous nature of glasses. Ganapathi et al. identify and measure the surface tension of these interfaces in bulk supercooled colloidal liquids.

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