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Related Experiment Videos

Equilibrium glassy phase in a polydisperse hard-sphere system.

Pinaki Chaudhuri1, Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta

  • 1Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India.

Physical Review Letters
|December 31, 2005
PubMed
Summary

The phase diagram of polydisperse hard spheres reveals that glass becomes the stable phase at high polydispersity. Increasing density at high polydispersity also drives a transition from crystal to glass.

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Area of Science:

  • Condensed matter physics
  • Statistical mechanics
  • Materials science

Background:

  • Understanding the phase behavior of polydisperse systems is crucial for materials design.
  • Hard-sphere models provide fundamental insights into phase transitions.
  • The interplay of size distribution and phase stability remains an active research area.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To computationally determine the phase diagram of a polydisperse hard-sphere system.
  • To investigate the influence of polydispersity on the crystalline and glassy phases.
  • To identify the conditions under which the glass phase becomes thermodynamically stable.

Main Methods:

  • Numerical minimization of a discretized Ramakrishnan-Yussouff free-energy functional.
  • Locating crystalline and glassy local free-energy minima.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Comparing free energies to map the phase diagram in the density-polydispersity plane.

    • Main Results:

    • The crystalline phase is replaced by the glass as the equilibrium phase beyond a terminal polydispersity.
    • A crystal-to-glass transition occurs with increasing density at high polydispersity.
    • The computed phase diagram shows qualitative similarity to hard spheres in a quenched random potential.

    Conclusions:

    • Polydispersity significantly alters the phase behavior of hard-sphere systems.
    • Glass can be the equilibrium phase in polydisperse systems, not just a metastable state.
    • The findings offer insights into the formation and stability of glassy materials.