Non-equilibrium dynamics of the glass transition: new perspectives from colloidal hard spheres

Abstract: A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides cornerstone of our study. We show that the so-called "dramatic slowing" that accompanies super-packing is due to correlated cage fluctuations, rather than caging per se. Their statistics establish that the amorphous assemblies of caged particles are in states of self-organised criticality. The implied connection between the onset of caging and the thermodynamic 1st order freezing transition challenges the status quo, as does our contention that the dynamically critical amorphous assemblies are precursory to that transition.