Identity crisis in alchemical space drives the entropic colloidal glass transition.

ABSTRACT: A universally accepted explanation for why liquids sometimes vitrify rather than crystallize remains hotly pursued, despite the ubiquity of glass in our everyday lives, the utilization of the glass transition in innumerable modern technologies, and nearly a century of theoretical and experimental investigation. Among the most compelling hypothesized mechanisms underlying glass formation is the development in the fluid phase of local structures that somehow prevent crystallization. Here, we explore that mechanism in the case of hard particle glasses by examining the glass transition in an extended alchemical (here, shape) space; that is, a space where particle shape is treated as a thermodynamic variable. We investigate simple systems of hard polyhedra, with no interactions aside from volum

SUBMITTER: Teich EG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6325105 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature