Non-monotonic effect of confinement on the glass transition

The relaxation dynamics of glass forming liquids and their structure are influenced in the vicinity of confining walls. This effect has mostly been observed to be a monotonic function of the slit width. Recently, a qualitatively new behaviour has been uncovered by Mittal and coworkers, who reported that the single particle dynamics in a hard-sphere fluid confined in a planar slit varies in a non-monotonic way as the slit width is decreased from five to roughly two particle diametres (Mittal et al 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 145901). In view of the great potential of this effect for applications in those fields of science and industry, where liquids occur under strong confinement (e.g. nano-technology), the number of researchers studying various aspects and consequences of this non-monotonic behaviour has been rapidly growing. This review aims at providing an overview of the research activity in this newly emerging field. We first briefly discuss how competing mechanisms such as packing effects and short-range attraction may lead to a non-monotonic glass transition scenario in the bulk. We then analyse confinement effects on the dynamics of fluids using a thermodynamic route which relates the single particle dynamics to the excess entropy. Moreover, relating the diffusive dynamics to the Widom's insertion probability, the oscillations of the local dynamics with density at moderate densities are fairly well described. At high densities belonging to the supercooled regime, however, this approach breaks down signaling the onset of strongly collective effects. Indeed, confinement introduces a new length scale which in the limit of high densities and small pore sizes competes with the short-range local order of the fluid. This gives rise to a non-monotonic dependence of the packing structure on confinement, with a corresponding effect on the dynamics of structural relaxation. This non-monotonic effect occurs also in the case of a cone-plate type channel, where the degree of confinement varies with distance from the apex. This is a very promising issue for future research with the possibility of uncovering the existence of alternating glassy and liquid-like domains.