Brownian Motion of Molecular Probes in Supercooled Liquids

When a supercooled liquid approaches glass transition, viscous flow slows down greatly, but often the Brownian motion of a molecular probe in the host liquid does not slow down as much, causing the Stokes-Einstein relation to fail by orders of magnitude. Here we formulate a theory that relates the B...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Physical review letters Vol. 114; no. 22; p. 224301
Main Authors:	Liu, Qihan, Huang, Shicheng, Suo, Zhigang
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 05-06-2015
Subjects:	Brownian motion Glass transition Liquids Viscous flow
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	When a supercooled liquid approaches glass transition, viscous flow slows down greatly, but often the Brownian motion of a molecular probe in the host liquid does not slow down as much, causing the Stokes-Einstein relation to fail by orders of magnitude. Here we formulate a theory that relates the Brownian motion of the probe to two concurrent processes in the host liquid: viscous flow and molecular hopping. Molecular hopping prevails over viscous flow when the probe is small and the temperature is low. Our theory generalizes the Stokes-Einstein relation and fits the experimental data remarkably well.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0031-9007 1079-7114
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.224301