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.
- Publication:
-
Soft Matter
- Pub Date:
- 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1039/C6SM00724D
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1603.07539
- Bibcode:
- 2017SMat...13..141A
- Keywords:
-
- Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics;
- Condensed Matter - Disordered Systems and Neural Networks;
- Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics;
- Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter;
- Physics - Chemical Physics
- E-Print:
- Soft Matter, 13 141 (2017)