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Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Measuring the Densities of Aqueous Glasses at Cryogenic Temperatures
Published on: June 28, 2017
Short-ranged attractions in jammed liquids: how cooling can melt a glass
Phillip L Geissler1, David R Reichman
1Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, USA.
Abstract:
We demonstrate that an extended picture of kinetic constraints in glass-forming liquids is sufficient to explain dynamic anomalies observed in dense suspensions of strongly attracting colloidal particles. We augment a simple model of heterogeneous relaxation with static attractions between facilitating excitations, in a way that mimics the structural effect of short-ranged interparticle attractions. The resulting spatial correlations among facilitated and unfacilitated regions give rise to relaxation mechanisms that account for nonmonotonic dependence of relaxation times on attraction strength as well as logarithmic decay of density correlations in time. These unusual features are a simple consequence of spatial segregation of kinetic constraints, suggesting an alternative physical perspective on attractive colloids than that suggested by mode-coupling theory. Based on the behavior of our model, we predict a crossover from super-Arrhenius to Arrhenius temperature dependence as attractions become dominant at fixed packing fraction.
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