Crossover in dynamics in the Kob-Andersen binary mixture glass-forming liquid

Abstract

Glass-forming liquids are broadly classified as being fragile or strong, depending on the deviation from Arrhenius behavior of their relaxation times. A fragile to strong crossover is observed or inferred in liquids like water and silica, and more recently also in metallic glasses and phase change alloys, leading to the expectation that such a crossover is more widely realised among glass formers. We investigate computationally the well-studied Kob-Andersen model, accessing temperatures well below the mode coupling temperature T_MCT. We find that relaxation times exhibit a crossover in dynamics around T_MCT, and discuss whether it bears characteristics of the fragile to strong crossover. Several aspects of dynamical heterogeneity exhibit behavior mirroring the dynamical crossover, whereas thermodynamic quantities do not. In particular, the Adam-Gibbs relation describing the relation between relaxation times and configurational entropy continues to hold below the dynamical crossover, when anharmonic corrections to the vibrational entropy are included.