Cooperative strings and glassy interfaces

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Abstract

We introduce a minimal theory of glass formation based on the ideas of molecular crowding and resultant string-like cooperative rearrangement, and address the effects of free interfaces. In the bulk case, we obtain a scaling expression for the number of particles taking part in cooperative strings, and we recover the Adam-Gibbs description of glassy dynamics. Then, by including thermal dilatation, the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann relation is derived. Moreover, the random and string-like characters of the cooperative rearrangement allow us to predict a temperature-dependent expression for the cooperative length Ξ of bulk relaxation. Finally, we explore the influence of sample boundaries when the system size becomes comparable to Ξ. The theory is in agreement with measurements of the glass-transition temperature of thin polymer films, and allows quantification of the temperature-dependent thickness h m of the interfacial mobile layer.

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Salez, T., Salez, J., Dalnoki-Veress, K., Raphaël, E., & Forrest, J. A. (2015). Cooperative strings and glassy interfaces. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(27), 8227–8231. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1503133112

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