Wednesday Colloquia

Two Tales on Glasses

by Prof. Rajesh Ganapathy (JNCASR Bangalore)

Wednesday, October 14, 2020 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Lecture Theatre (Online through ZOOM Webinar) ( https://zoom.us/j/97963259354?pwd=ZFZsa2xqWGJSZW5pUjZPNkNqeGlEZz09 )
Meeting ID: 979 6325 9354 Pass code: 04072020
Description
Glasses inhabit a complex and rugged energy landscape. The system remains trapped in local minima surrounded by huge energy barriers. However, given sufficient time, sometimes millennia, slow sub-particle diameter relaxations in structural glasses, be it atomic/molecular or colloidal ones, can lead to crystallization. The transformation of a glass into a crystal – devitrification - has never before been captured in experiments. In the first part of my talk, I will present results from a single particle-resolved imaging study on colloidal glasses that captured this process for the first time [1]. In the second part of my talk, I will describe experiments that show that an immediate consequence of the jaggedness of the energy land scape is the ability to form both single and multiple memories in a glass of an externally imposed mechanical drive [2].

References:

[1] Divya Ganapathi, Dibyashree Chakrabarti, A K Sood and Rajesh Ganapathy, Nature Phys. (2020) 
[2] Srimayee Mukherji, Neelima Kandula, A K Sood and Rajesh Ganapathy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 158001 (2019)