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 Thg3 2016
Accepted
06 Thg6 2016
First published
06 Thg6 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

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