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A phase space approach to supercooled liquids and a universal collapse of their viscosity
2016, Weingartner, Nicholas B., Pueblo, Chris, Nogueira, Flavio S., Kelton, K. F., Nussinov, Zohar
A broad fundamental understanding of the mechanisms underlying the phenomenology of supercooled liquids has remained elusive, despite decades of intense exploration. When supercooled beneath its characteristic melting temperature, a liquid sees a sharp rise in its viscosity over a narrow temperature range, eventually becoming frozen on laboratory timescales. Explaining this immense increase in viscosity is one of the principle goals of condensed matter physicists. To that end, numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed, which explain and reproduce the temperature dependence of the viscosity of supercooled liquids. Each of these frameworks appears only applicable to specific classes of glassformers, and each possesses a number of variable parameters. Here, we describe a classical framework for explaining the dynamical behavior of supercooled liquids based on statistical mechanical considerations, and possessing only a single variable parameter. This parameter varies weakly from liquid to liquid. Furthermore, as predicted by this new classical theory and its earlier quantum counterpart, we find with the aid of a small dimensionless constant that varies in size from ∼0.05 to 0.12, a universal (16 decades) collapse of the viscosity data as a function of temperature. The collapse appears in all known types of glass-forming supercooled liquids (silicates, metallic alloys, organic systems, chalcogenide, sugars, and water).
Deviations from Arrhenius dynamics in high temperature liquids, a possible collapse, and a viscosity bound
2022, Xue, Jing, Nogueira, Flavio S., Kelton, K.F., Nussinov, Zohar
Liquids realize a highly complex state of matter in which strong competing kinetic and interaction effects come to life. As such, liquids are, generally, more challenging to understand than either gases or solids. In weakly interacting gases, the kinetic effects dominate. By contrast, low temperature solids typically feature far smaller fluctuations about their ground state. Notwithstanding their complexity, with the exception of quantum fluids (e.g., superfluid helium) and supercooled liquids (including glasses), various aspects of common liquid dynamics such as their dynamic viscosity are often assumed to be given by rather simple, Arrhenius-type, activated forms with nearly constant (i.e., temperature independent) energy barriers. In this paper, we analyze experimentally measured viscosities of numerous liquids far above their equilibrium melting temperature to see how well this assumption fares. We find, for the investigated liquids, marked deviations from simple activated dynamics. Even far above their equilibrium melting temperatures, as the temperature drops, the viscosity of these liquids increases more strongly than predicted by activated dynamics dominated by a single uniform energy barrier. For metallic fluids, the scale of the prefactors of the best Arrhenius fits for the viscosity is typically consistent with that given by the product (nh) with n the number density and h Planck's constant. More generally, in various fluids (whether metallic or nonmetallic) that we examined, (nh) constitutes a lower bound scale on the viscosity. We find that a scaling of the temperature axis (complementing that of the viscosity) leads to a partial collapse of the temperature dependent viscosities of different fluids; such a scaling allows for a functional dependence of the viscosity on temperature that includes yet is far more general than activated Arrhenius form alone. We speculate on relations between non-Arrhenius dynamics and thermodynamic observables.