Studies of kinetic glass transition in a triblock copolymer micellar system

If a liquid is cooled sufficiently below the melting point, it becomes metastable with respect to the crystalline state. However, if nucleation is suppressed, one can supercools the liquid without resulting in crystallization. The characteristic time for structural relaxation increases rapidly and at a certain point, it becomes comparable to the duration of experiment time scale. At this point, the liquid is being arrested structurally. We define this structurally arrested matter a glass. Dynamically, a glass transition can be viewed as a transition from ergodic to nonergodic state of matters. In a hard-sphere system, mode coupling theory (MCT) predicts occurrence of a glass transition when the volume fraction exceeds a certain value due to the excluded volume effect. However, Recent MCT calculations for a hard-sphere system with a short-range attraction show that one may observe a new type of structurally arrested state originating from clustering effect, called the "attractive glass", as a result of the attractive interaction. This is in addition to the well-known glass-forming mechanism due to the cage effect in the hard sphere system, called the repulsive glass.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Chen, Wei-Ren, 1970-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sow-Hsin Chen.

• Nuclear Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33645

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33645