Dynamic heterogeneity in hard and soft sphere colloidal glasses

Abstract

The nature of dynamic correlations in glasses and jammed soft matter remains a puzzle. Despite the strong increase in viscosity, hard-spheres exhibit only moderate increase of dynamic correlations at the glass transition, while recent experiments on soft-spheres suggest that in these systems, correlations grow to macroscopic length. Here, we present a direct real-space analysis of dynamic correlations in hard and soft-sphere glasses. The motion of the particles is imaged directly with confocal microscopy, and the maximum dynamical susceptibility is determined systematically over a range of probe length and time scales. We elucidate the displacement vector field, and analyze correlations in the particles' direction of motion. This allows us to demonstrate the different nature of relaxations in hard and soft-sphere systems. We find that the deeply jammed soft sphere suspension shows by far longer-range dynamic correlations that are characterized by small, remarkably coherent displacements. These observations provide direct evidence of the internal elasticity that governs long-range relaxation modes in soft systems.