Glassy dynamics of partially pinned fluids: an alternative mode-coupling approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a new mode-coupling approach to study glassy dynamics in partially pinned fluids, predicting a glass transition scenario similar to mean-field theories and highlighting the challenges in detecting many-body correlations.

Contribution

It introduces an alternative mode-coupling framework that aligns with mean-field predictions and clarifies the interpretation of static overlap measurements.

Findings

Predicts a random pinning glass transition similar to mean-field models

Static overlap is mainly influenced by low pinning fractions

Careful analysis needed to detect many-body point-to-set correlations

Abstract

We use a simple mode-coupling approach to investigate glassy dynamics of partially pinned fluid systems. Our approach is different from the mode-coupling theory developed by Krakoviack [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 065703 (2005), Phys. Rev. E 84, 050501(R) (2011)]. In contrast to Krakoviack's theory, our approach predicts a random pinning glass transition scenario that is qualitatively the same as the scenario obtained using a mean-field analysis of the spherical p-spin model and a mean-field version of the random first-order transition theory. We use our approach to calculate quantities which are often considered to be indicators of growing dynamic correlations and static point-to-set correlations. We find that the so-called static overlap is dominated by the simple, low pinning fraction contribution. Thus, at least for randomly pinned fluid systems, only a careful quantitative analysis of simulation results can reveal genuine, many-body point-to-set correlations.