On the possible existence of crystallites in glass-forming liquids

Jeppe C. Dyre

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arXiv · cond-mat/0612671

On the possible existence of crystallites in glass-forming liquids

Jeppe C. Dyre

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Abstract

We speculate that glass-forming liquids may contain fairly large and well-defined crystallites. This is based on arguing that the slowly relaxing "frozen-in" stresses characterizing ultraviscous liquids increase the barrier for nucleation, thus allowing for larger unstable crystallites than otherwise possible. The frozen-in stresses also deform the crystallites, making their observation difficult; specifically it is argued that a situation where 1/N of the molecules form N X N X N crystallites would be hard to detect by standard X-ray or neutron scattering experiments.

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Jeppe C. Dyre. 2006-12-28. On the possible existence of crystallites in glass-forming liquids. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0612671

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