Confined viscous liquids: Interfacial versus finite size effects

Random close packing of disks and spheres in confined geometries

“…For example, many experiments study how confinement modifies the glass transition; samples which have a well-characterized glass transition in large samples show markedly different properties when confined to small samples [28,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57]. However, it's not clear if these changes are due to boundaries or finite size effects [58]. Our results show that boundaries significantly modify the packing, which may in turn modify behavior of these confined molecular systems [28].…”

Dielectric and thermal studies of the segmental dynamics of poly(methyl methacrylate)/silica nanocomposites prepared by the sol–gel method

“…It is interesting that the same work discussed that this fraction of the polymer is not observed to devitrify even at very high temperatures. This picture seems to change qualitatively after using dielectric techniques, 40,41 which depict a different behavior. The dielectric relaxation linked to the glass transition is directly observed as a strong peak, although it exhibits longer relaxation times (two to three orders of magnitude).…”

Dynamics of Materials at the Nanoscale: Small‐Molecule Liquids and Polymer Films

“…It is clear that such macroscopic effects cannot fully account for the observed behaviors, although they may contribute. The second important factor is the exact nature of the confinement as "hard" or "soft", and this is an aspect of the confinement properties that has been emphasized by Richert and co-workers [Wang et al, 2004;He et al, 2005He et al, , 2007. The important point to be taken away from the work of Richert is that there does seem to be an influence of the actual "hardness" of the confinement on the dynamics (or the T g ) of the confined fluid of interest and how strongly the slowing due to this interaction is transmitted into the interior of the liquid.…”