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Abstract
The glass transition1 is considered to be one of the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. Despite decades of effort, a general consensus on the validity of a universal theory for the large variety of glass systems is lacking2,3—partly because of difficulties encountered in the experimental testing of the theoretical predictions4,5. Here, we present experiments on a colloidal glass made of micrometre-sized particles in a fluid. We investigate the autocorrelation and response function to monitor the ageing of a colloidal glass. At equilibrium, all the observables are stationary, whereas in the out-of-equilibrium glassy state they have an explicit dependence on the age of the system. We find that the transport coefficients scale with the ageing time as a power law, a signature of the slow relaxation. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that the glassy system has thermalized at a constant temperature independent of the age and warmer than the bath, reflecting the structural rearrangements of cage dynamics. Furthermore, we find a universal scaling law to describe the global and local fluctuations of the observables.Cite this article
Wang, P., Song, C. & Makse, H. Dynamic particle tracking reveals the ageing temperature of a colloidal glass. Nature Phys 2, 526–531 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys366 