Viscoelasticity of glycerol at ultra-high frequencies investigated via molecular dynamics simulations

Deformations, relaxation, and broken symmetries in liquids, solids, and glasses: A unified topological field theory

We combine hydrodynamic and field theoretic methods to develop a general theory of phonons as Goldstone bosons in crystals, glasses, and liquids based on nonaffine displacements and the consequent Goldstone phase relaxation. We relate the conservation, or lack thereof, of specific higher-form currents with properties of the underlying deformation field-nonaffinity-which dictates how molecules move under an applied stress or deformation. In particular, the single-valuedness of the deformation field is associated with conservation of higher-form charges that count the number of topological defects. Our formalism predicts, from first principles, the presence of propagating shear waves above a critical wave vector in liquids, thus giving a formal derivation of the phenomenon in terms of fundamental symmetries. The same picture provides also a theoretical explanation of the corresponding "positive sound dispersion" phenomenon for longitudinal sound. Importantly, accordingly to our theory, the main collective relaxation timescale of a liquid or a glass (known as the α relaxation for the latter) is given by the phase relaxation time, which is not necessarily related to the Maxwell time. Finally, we build a nonequilibrium effective action using the in-in formalism defined on the Schwinger-Keldysh contour, that further supports the emerging picture. In summary, our work suggests that the fundamental difference between solids, fluids, and glasses has to be identified with the associated generalized higher-form global symmetries and their topological structure, and that the Burgers vector for the displacement fields serves as a suitable topological order parameter distinguishing the solid (ordered) phase and the amorphous ones (fluids, glasses).

Energy Renormalization Method for the Coarse-Graining of Polymer Viscoelasticity

Developing temperature transferable coarse-grained (CG) models is essential for the computational prediction of polymeric glass-forming (GF) material behavior, but their dynamics are often greatly altered from those of all-atom (AA) models mainly because of the reduced fluid configurational entropy under coarse-graining. To address this issue, we have recently introduced an energy renormalization (ER) strategy that corrects the activation free energy of the CG polymer model by renormalizing the cohesive interaction strength ε as a function of temperature T, i.e., ε(T), thus semiempirically preserving the T-dependent dynamics of the AA model. Here we apply our ER method to consider-in addition to T-dependency-the frequency f-dependent polymer viscoelasticity. Through smallamplitude oscillatory shear molecular dynamics simulations, we show that changing the imposed oscillation f on the CG systems requires changes in ε values (i.e., ε(T, f)) to reproduce the AA viscoelasticity. By accounting for the dynamic fragility of polymers as a material parameter, we are able to predict ε(T, f) under coarse-graining in order to capture the AA viscoelasticity, and consequently the activation energy, across a wide range of T and f in the GF regime. Specifically, we showcase our achievements on two representative polymers of distinct fragilities, polybutadiene (PB) and polystyrene (PS), and show that our CG models are able to sample viscoelasticity up to the megahertz regime, which approaches state-of-the-art experimental resolutions, and capture results sampled via AA simulations and prior experiments.

Pressure Dependence of the Boson Peak of Glassy Glycerol

The pressure dependence of the boson peak (BP) of glycerol, including its behavior across the liquid-glass transition, has been studied using Raman scattering. A significant increase of the BP frequency was observed with pressure up to 11 GPa at room temperature. The pressure dependence of BP frequency ν_BP is proportional to (1+P/P₀)^1/3, where P and P₀ are the pressure and a constant, respectively, consistent with a soft potential model. The characteristic length of medium range order is close in size to a cyclic trimer of glycerol molecules, as predicted by the medium range order of a BP excitation using molecular dynamics simulations, and the pressure dependence of a characteristic medium range order is nearly constant. The pressure induced structural changes in glycerol can be understood in terms of the shrinkage of voids with cyclic trimers persisting to at least 11 GPa. Pressure dependence of the intermolecular O-H stretching mode indicates that the intermolecular hydrogen bond distances gradually decrease up to the glass transition pressure of ∼5 GPa and become nearly constant in the glassy state, indicating the disappearance of free volume in the dense glass.