Abstract
The mechanism by which a liquid may become arrested, forming a glass or gel, is a long-standing problem of materials science. In particular, long-lived (energetically) locally favoured structures (LFSs), the geometry of which may prevent the system relaxing to its equilibrium state, have long been thought to play a key role in dynamical arrest. Here, we propose a definition of LFSs which we identify with a novel topological method and directly measure with experiments on a colloidal liquid–gel transition. The population of LFSs is a strong function of (effective) temperature in the ergodic liquid phase, rising sharply approaching dynamical arrest, and indeed forms a percolating network that becomes the ‘arms’ of the gel. Owing to the LFSs, the gel is unable to reach equilibrium, crystal–gas coexistence. Our results provide direct experimental observation of a link between local structure and dynamical arrest, and open a new perspective on a wide range of metastable materials.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to A. van Blaaderen and D. Derks for particle synthesis help and gifts. We wish to thank P. Bartlett, D. Derks, D. Head and R. Jack for critical reading of the manuscript, and T. Ichikawa for kind instrumentation support. This work was partially supported by a grant-in-aid from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. C.P.R. is grateful to the Royal Society for financial support.
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C.P.R., S.R.W. and H.T. conceived the project and wrote the manuscript, C.P.R. carried out the experiments, simulation and analysis, S.R.W. wrote the TCC code and T.O. wrote the W6 analysis code.
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Patrick Royall, C., Williams, S., Ohtsuka, T. et al. Direct observation of a local structural mechanism for dynamic arrest. Nature Mater 7, 556–561 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2219
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2219
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