open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/65941

Cooperative strings in glassy nanoparticles

英語

2016-06-06

Royal Society of Chemistry

Soft matter

13(1)

141-146

Motivated by recent experimental results on glassy polymer nanoparticles, we develop a minimal theoretical framework for the glass transition in spherical confinement. This is accomplished using our cooperative-string model for supercooled dynamics, that was successful at recovering the bulk phenomenology and describing the thin-film anomalies. In particular, we obtain predictions for the mobile-layer thickness as a function of temperature, and for the effective glass-transition temperature as a function of the radius of the spherical nanoparticle - including the existence of a critical particle radius below which vitrification never occurs. Finally, we compare the theoretical results to experimental data on polystyrene from the recent literature, and we discuss the latter.

学術雑誌論文

Accepted Manuscript

1744-683X

AA12068335