title: Shape-designed frustration by local polymorphism in a near-equilibrium colloidal glass.
abstract: We show that hard, convex, lithographic, prismatic kite platelets, each having three 72° vertices and one 144° vertex, preferentially form a disordered and arrested 2D glass when concentrated quasi-statically in a monolayer while experiencing thermal Brownian fluctuations. By contrast with 2D systems of other hard convex shapes, such as squares, rhombs, and pentagons, which readily form crystals at high densities, 72° kites retain a liquid-like disordered structure that becomes frozen-in as their long-time translational and rotational diffusion become highly bounded, yielding a 2D colloidal glass. This robust glass-forming propensity arises from competition between highly diverse few-particle local polymorphic configurations (LPCs) that have incommensurate features and symmetries. Thus, entropy maximization is consistent with the preservation of highly diverse LPCs en route to the arrested glass.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering, Ministry of Education, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, People's Republic of China kunzhao@tju.edu.cn mason@chem.ucla.edu.
authors.forename: Kun
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; kunzhao@tju.edu.cn mason@chem.ucla.edu.
authors.forename: Thomas G
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Mason
keywords: Brownian; disorder; entropy; nonergodic; two-dimensional