Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localized soft modes

Localized soft elasticity in liquid crystal elastomers

Synthetic approaches to prepare designer materials that localize deformation, by combining rigidity and compliance in a single material, have been widely sought. Bottom-up approaches, such as the self-organization of liquid crystals, offer potential advantages over top-down patterning methods such as photolithographic control of crosslink density, relating to the ease of preparation and fidelit...

Structural relaxation in a supercooled molecular liquid

– We perform molecular-dynamics simulations of a molecular system in supercooled states for different values of inertia parameters to provide evidence that the long-time dynamics depends only on the equilibrium structure. This observation is consistent with the prediction of the mode-coupling theory for the glass transition and with the hypothesis that the potential energylandscape controls the...

Elastic Behavior in a Supercooled Liquid - analysis

Stringlike Cooperative Motion in a Supercooled Liquid

Claudio Donati,1 Jack F. Douglas,1,2 Walter Kob,3 Steven J. Plimpton,4 Peter H. Poole,5 and Sharon C. Glotzer1,2,* 1Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science, NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 2Polymers Division, NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 3Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Staudinger Weg 7, D-55099 Mainz, Germany 4Parallel Computational Sciences Dep...

Soft modes and nonaffine rearrangements in the inherent structures of supercooled liquids.

We find that the hierarchical organization of the potential energy landscape in a model supercooled liquid can be related to a change in the spatial distribution of soft normal modes. For groups of nearby minima, between which fast relaxation processes typically occur, the localization of the soft modes is very similar. The spatial distribution of soft regions changes, instead, for minima betwe...