Dependence of local order on cooling rate investigated in a colloidal glass

Abstract The cooling rate with which liquid is cooled tremendously affects the properties of amorphous solids, but little information on underlying mechanism for this dependence is available, mainly due to the lack of clear characterization on microstructural variation. We built a colloidal glass to directly investigate the effect of cooling rate on local order. By quantifying effective cooling rate and structural properties, we show how local order changes with cooling rate. Furthermore we demonstrate that free-volume distribution results in local-order evolution.