Higher-order glass-transition singularities in colloidal systems with attractive interactions.
The transition from a liquid to a glass in colloidal suspensions of particles interacting through a hard core plus an attractive square-well potential is studied within the mode-coupling-theory framework. When the width of the attractive potential is much shorter than the hard-core diameter, a reentrant behavior of the liquid-glass line and a glass-glass-transition line are found in the temperature-density plane of the model. For small well-width values, the glass-glass-transition line terminates in a third-order bifurcation point, i.e., in a A3 (cusp) singularity. On increasing the square-well width, the glass-glass line disappears, giving rise to a fourth-order A4 (swallow-tail) singularity at a critical well width. Close to the A3 and A4 singularities the decay of the density correlators shows stretching of huge dynamical windows, in particular logarithmic time dependence.
Dawson
K
K
Irish Centre for Colloid Science and Biomaterials, University College Dublin, Belfield.
Foffi
G
G
Fuchs
M
M
Götze
W
W
Sciortino
F
F
Sperl
M
M
Tartaglia
P
P
Voigtmann
T
T
Zaccarelli
E
E