Entropic Timescales of Dynamic Heterogeneity in Supercooled Liquid

TL;DR

This paper uses information theory to quantify dynamic heterogeneity in supercooled liquids, revealing differences from traditional methods and identifying diverging timescales near the glass transition.

Contribution

It introduces an information-theoretic measure, negentropy, to analyze dynamic heterogeneity, providing new insights into timescales and intermittency in supercooled liquids.

Findings

Negentropy-based heterogeneity differs from moment-based measures.

Diverging timescales are observed near the glass transition.

Information-theoretic approach captures strong intermittency effects.

Abstract

Non-Gaussian displacement distributions are universal predictors of dynamic heterogeneity in slowly varying environments. Here, we explore heterogeneous dynamics in supercooled liquid using molecular dynamics simulations and show the efficiency of the information-theoretic measure in quantifying dynamic heterogeneity over the widely used moment-based quantifications of nonGaussianity. Our analysis shows that the heterogeneity quantified by the negentropy is significantly different from the one obtained using the conventional approach that considers deviation from Gaussianity up to lower-order moments. Further, we extract the timescales of dynamic heterogeneity using the two methods and show that the differential changes diverge as the system experiences strong intermittency near the glass transition.