A thermodynamic description of colloidal glasses

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced theoretical methods to explore the phase behavior of high-dimensional colloidal glasses, revealing complex phenomena like reentrant transitions and multiple glass states influenced by interparticle attraction.

Contribution

It extends the Franz-Parisi and replica methods to analyze higher-order glass singularities and highlights the role of attraction in complex glassy phenomena in large dimensions.

Findings

Reentrant liquid-glass transition in attractive potentials

Multiple glass states and glass-glass transitions observed

Attraction is key for complex glass behavior in high dimensions

Abstract

The phase behavior of hard-sphere particles interacting with a short-ranged potential is studied in the limit of infinite space dimensionality via the Franz-Parisi approach and the replica method of disordered systems. For an attractive square-well potential the phase diagram exhibits reentrancy of the liquid-glass transition, multiple glass states and glass-glass transition. For a repulsive square shoulder potential no such special features are observed. Our results show that the Franz-Parisi approach can be consistently extended to deal with higher-order glass singularities and that interparticle attraction is crucial for complex glassy behavior in large enough dimensions, at least for monodisperse systems.