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Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
How a liquid becomes a glass both on cooling and on heating
Xinhui Lu1, S G J Mochrie, S Narayanan
1Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
Abstract:
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to control the strength of an attraction between particles and multispeckle x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to determine the particles' collective dynamics. This model system undergoes a glass transition both on cooling and on heating, and the intermediate liquid realizes unusual logarithmic relaxations. How vitrification occurs for the two different glass transitions is characterized in detail and comparisons are drawn to recent theoretical predictions for glass formation in systems with attractive interactions.
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