科研之友
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摘要
Structural relaxation is central to the understanding of many fundamental properties of amorphous materials. Despite its importance, the underlying mechanisms leading to the structural relaxation remain not well understood, especially how it nucleates from amorphous matrix. As natural heterogeneity, the original distributed free volume has been supposed to be associated with the activation of structural relaxation in amorphous solids. However, there has been no direct experimental proof for this hypothesis. Here, we used a colloidal glass to directly observe the structural relaxation and free volume distribution. We found a strong spatial correlation between the structural relaxation and free volume.
