Corresponding States of Structural Glass Formers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a universal parabola describing the temperature dependence of transport properties in fragile glass formers, revealing a bounded super-Arrhenius behavior with no finite-temperature singularity.

Contribution

It introduces a universal collapse of transport data onto a single parabola, unifying behaviors across diverse fragile glass-forming liquids and simulations.

Findings

Transport properties collapse onto a universal parabola

No singular behavior at finite temperature

Bounded by an onset temperature T0

Abstract

The variation with respect to temperature T of transport properties of 58 fragile structural glass forming liquids (68 data sets in total) are analyzed and shown to exhibit a remarkable degree of universality. In particular, super-Arrhenius behaviors of all super-cooled liquids appear to collapse to one parabola for which there is no singular behavior at any finite temperature. This behavior is bounded by an onset temperature To above which liquid transport has a much weaker temperature dependence. A similar collapse is also demonstrated, over the smaller available range, for existing numerical simulation data.