Dynamical arrest and replica symmetry breaking in attractive colloids

TL;DR

This paper uses the replica symmetry breaking framework to study structural glass transitions in attractive colloids, revealing reentrant behavior and discrepancies with mode coupling theory predictions.

Contribution

It applies RSB theory to a colloid model with attraction, exploring glass transition lines and comparing with MCT, highlighting differences and methodological validation.

Findings

Reentrant glass transition line in density-temperature plane

Absence of predicted high-density glass-glass transition

Systematic validation of the RSB approach for hard sphere fluids

Abstract

Within the Replica Symmetry Breaking (RSB) framework developed by M.Mezard and G.Parisi we investigate the occurrence of structural glass transitions in a model of fluid characterized by hard sphere repulsion together with short range attraction. This model is appropriate for the description of a class of colloidal suspensions. The transition line in the density-temperature plane displays a reentrant behavior, in agreement with Mode Coupling Theory (MCT), a dynamical approach based on the Mori-Zwanzig formalism. Quantitative differences are however found, together with the absence of the predicted glass-glass transition at high density. We also perform a systematic study of the pure hard sphere fluid in order to ascertain the accuracy of the adopted method and the convergence of the numerical procedure.