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Published on: October 31, 2019
Anomalous glassy relaxation near the isotropic-nematic phase transition
Prasanth P Jose1, Dwaipayan Chakrabarti, Biman Bagchi
1Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Abstract:
Dynamical heterogeneity in a system of Gay-Berne ellipsoids near its isotropic-nematic (I-N) transition, and also in an equimolar mixture of Lennard-Jones spheres and Gay-Berne ellipsoids in deeply supercooled regime, is probed by the time evolution of non-Gaussian parameters (NGP). The appearance of a dominant second peak in the rotational NGP near the I-N transition signals the growth of pseudonematic domains. Surprisingly, such a second peak is instead observed in the translational NGP for the glassy binary mixture. Localization of orientational motion near the I-N transition is found to be responsible for the observed anomalous orientational relaxation.
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