Letter abstract
Nature Physics 2, 526 - 531 (2006)
doi:10.1038/nphys366
Subject Categories: Condensed-matter physics | Materials physics | Statistical physics, thermodynamics and nonlinear dynamics
Dynamic particle tracking reveals the ageing temperature of a colloidal glass
Ping Wang, Chaoming Song and Hernán A. Makse
The glass transition1 is considered to be one of the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. Despite decades of effort, a general consensus on the validity of a universal theory for the large variety of glass systems is lacking2, 3—partly because of difficulties encountered in the experimental testing of the theoretical predictions4, 5. Here, we present experiments on a colloidal glass made of micrometre-sized particles in a fluid. We investigate the autocorrelation and response function to monitor the ageing of a colloidal glass. At equilibrium, all the observables are stationary, whereas in the out-of-equilibrium glassy state they have an explicit dependence on the age of the system. We find that the transport coefficients scale with the ageing time as a power law, a signature of the slow relaxation. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that the glassy system has thermalized at a constant temperature independent of the age and warmer than the bath, reflecting the structural rearrangements of cage dynamics. Furthermore, we find a universal scaling law to describe the global and local fluctuations of the observables.
- Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York 10031, USA
Correspondence to: Hernán A. Makse e-mail: hmakse@levdec.engr.ccny.cuny.edu
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