Decorrelation of the static and dynamic length scales in hard-sphere glass formers

摘要

We show that, in the equilibrium phase of glass-forming hard-sphere fluids in three dimensions, the staticnlength scales tentatively associated with the dynamical slowdown and the dynamical length characterizing spatialnheterogeneities in the dynamics unambiguously decorrelate. The former grow at a much slower rate than thenlatter when density increases. This observation is valid for the dynamical range that is accessible to computernsimulations, which roughly corresponds to that accessible in colloidal experiments. We also find that, in thisnsame range, no one-to-one correspondence between relaxation time and point-to-set correlation length exists.nThese results point to the coexistence of several relaxation mechanisms in the dynamically accessible regime ofnthree-dimensional hard-sphere glass formers.