The ultimate fate of supercooled liquids.

J Phys Chem A

Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany.

Published: April 2011

In recent years it has become widely accepted that a dynamical length scale ξ(α) plays an important role in supercooled liquids near the glass transition. We examine the implications of the interplay between the growing ξ(α) and the size of the crystal nucleus, ξ(M), which shrinks on cooling. We argue that at low temperatures where ξ(α) > ξ(M) a new crystallization mechanism emerges, enabling rapid development of a large scale web of sparsely connected crystallinity. Though we predict this web percolates the system at too low a temperature to be easily seen in the laboratory, there are noticeable residual effects near the glass transition that can account for several previously observed unexplained phenomena of deeply supercooled liquids including Fischer clusters and anomalous crystal growth near T(g).

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174050PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp1060057DOI Listing

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