Dynamical Heterogeneity and Nonlinear Susceptibility in Short-Ranged Attractive Supercooled Liquids

TL;DR

This paper compares the dynamical heterogeneity and nonlinear susceptibility in supercooled liquids with short-ranged attraction versus repulsion, revealing qualitative differences in their dynamical behavior and length scales.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of higher-order correlation functions, highlighting differences in wave vector and time dependence between attractive and repulsive glass-forming liquids.

Findings

Distinct wave vector dependence in attractive vs. repulsive systems

Different time evolution of nonlinear four-point susceptibility

Implications for understanding dynamical heterogeneity in glasses

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated the strong qualitative differences between the dynamics near a glass transition driven by short-ranged repulsion and one governed by short-ranged attraction. Here, we study in detail the behavior of non-linear, higher-order correlation functions that measure the growth of length scales associated with dynamical heterogeneity in both types of systems. We find that this measure is qualitatively different in the repulsive and attractive cases with regards to the wave vector dependence as well as the time dependence of the standard non-linear four-point dynamical susceptibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the general understanding of dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids.