Dynamical coexistence in moderately polydisperse hard-sphere glasses

Abstract

We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are generated by event-driven molecular dynamics. We show that these trajectories can be characterized in terms of local structure, and we find a dynamical-structural (active-inactive) phase transition between two dynamical phases: one dominated by liquid-like trajectories with low degree of local order and one dominated by glassy-like trajectories with a high degree of local order. We show that both phases coexist and are separated by a spatiotemporal interface. Sampling exceptionally long trajectories allows to perform a systematic finite-size scaling analysis. We find excellent agreement with Binder's scaling theory for first-order transitions. Interestingly, the coexistence region narrows at higher densities, supporting the idea of a critical point controlling the dynamic arrest. arXiv:1910.12045v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech]

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“…TPS also enables investigating of dynamical phase transitions in glassy systems, [ 56,163–168 ] using the framework of large deviation theory. While this is not a barrier crossing, the trajectories are rare and TPS can be applied to sample them.…”

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Modeling of biomolecular machines in non-equilibrium steady states

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