Energy Landscape, Anti-Plasticization and Polydispersity Induced Crossover of Heterogeneity in Supercooled Polydisperse Liquids

TL;DR

This paper investigates how polydispersity influences the energy landscape, glass transition, and heterogeneity in supercooled liquids, revealing a crossover behavior driven by temperature and polydispersity levels.

Contribution

It uncovers the impact of polydispersity on energy landscape and heterogeneity, highlighting a temperature-dependent crossover in supercooled polydisperse liquids.

Findings

Higher polydispersity lowers inherent structure energy with temperature.

Polydispersity reduces glass transition temperature and fragility.

A temperature-dependent crossover of heterogeneity is observed at low temperatures.

Abstract

Polydispersity is found to have a significant effect on the potential energy landscape; the the average inherent structure energy with temperature decreases with polydispersity. Increasing polydispersity at fixed volume fraction decreases the glass transition temperature and the fragility of glass formation analogous to the antiplasticization seen in some polymeric melts. An interesting temperature dependent crossover of heterogeneity with polydispersity is observed at low temperature due to the faster build-up of dynamic heterogeneity at lower polydispersity.