Description of Research Area

A01-004  Slow Dynamics of Fluctuation and Hidden Order Parameters in Glass

Research Subject

The primary target of our project is to understand the glass transition of supercooled liquids and jamming transition of the colloidal suspensions and granular materials. Both transitions are characterized by freezing of motions of the constituent particles with random configurations at low temperatures or/and high densities. Various soft condensed matters including the dense colloidal suspensions are also said to be glassy in that they are also randomly frozen. What is the crucial cause to have the system frozen? For normal liquid-solid transition, the answer is, of course, the emergence of the crystalline order. Does it imply that one should also expect something like a "random order" in the glassy materials? If so, how the microscopic randomness of the atomic configurations end up with the macroscopic "solidness" or the rigidity? Our major goal is to answer theoretically as well as numerically to this apparently naive but unexpectedly fundamental questions, focusing on the spatiotemporal hierarchy of the mesoscopic fluctuations bridging between microscopic and macroscopic realms.

Co-Investigator

YOSHINO, Hajime

Cybermedia Center, Osaka University