Issue 1, 2017

Cooperative strings in glassy nanoparticles

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental results on glassy polymer nanoparticles, we develop a minimal theoretical framework for the glass transition in spherical confinement. This is accomplished using our cooperative-string model for supercooled dynamics, that was successful at recovering the bulk phenomenology and describing the thin-film anomalies. In particular, we obtain predictions for the mobile-layer thickness as a function of temperature, and for the effective glass-transition temperature as a function of the radius of the spherical nanoparticle – including the existence of a critical particle radius below which vitrification never occurs. Finally, we compare the theoretical results to experimental data on polystyrene from the recent literature, and we discuss the latter.

Graphical abstract: Cooperative strings in glassy nanoparticles

Associated articles

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 mar 2016
Accepted
06 jun 2016
First published
06 jun 2016

Soft Matter, 2017,13, 141-146

Cooperative strings in glassy nanoparticles

M. Arutkin, E. Raphaël, J. A. Forrest and T. Salez, Soft Matter, 2017, 13, 141 DOI: 10.1039/C6SM00724D

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements