Macroscopic Facilitation of Glassy Relaxation Kinetics: Ultra Stable Glass Films with Front-Like Thermal Response

TL;DR

This paper presents a generic model explaining how ultra-stable glass films are formed and how they respond to temperature changes, revealing enhanced relaxation and front-like behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework that accounts for the formation, relaxation enhancement, and front-like thermal response of ultra-stable glass films.

Findings

Ultra-stable films exhibit relaxation rates increased by a factor of 10^5.

Front-like response to temperature jumps is explained by the model.

The model captures the temperature dependence of front velocity.

Abstract

The recent experimental fabrication of ultra stable glass films via vapour deposition [Science 315, 353 (2007)] and the observation of front-like response to the annealing of these films [Phys.Rev.Lett. 102, 065503 (2009)], have raised important questions about the possibility of manipulating the properties of glass films and addressing fundamental questions about kinetics and thermodynamics of amorphous materials. Central to both of these issues is the need to establish the essential physics that governs the formation of the ultra-stable films and their subsequent response. In this paper we demonstrate that a generic model of glassy dynamics can account for the formation of ultra-stable films, the associated enhancement of relaxation rates by a factor of 10^5, the observation of front-like response to temperature jumps and the temperature dependence of the front velocity