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Letter

Nature Physics 3, 26–28 (1 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/nphys482

Local fluctuations in the ageing of a simple structural glass

Horacio E. Castillo & Azita Parsaeian

The presence of dynamical heterogeneities—that is, nanometre-scale regions of molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared with the bulk—is increasingly being recognized as crucial to our understanding of the glass transition, from the non-exponential relaxation to the divergence of the relaxation times. Although recent experiments and simulations have observed their presence directly, a clear physical picture of their origin is still lacking.