Quench rate independence of the hard sphere glass transition

Abstract

About 200 glasses were made by compressing the hard sphere fluid. The location of the glass transition is not measurably changed when the rate at which the fluid is compressed through the transition is varied by a factor of 500. There is small variance in the properties of the glasses but no statistically significant effects of compression rate. The equation of state of each glass can be expressed as PV/NkT = C_i /(1 - z/z_i ) where C_i = 2·67 ± 0·05 is the configurational heat capacity in units of Nk, and the limiting density of the glasses z_i = 0·875 ± 0·003 (relative to the close packed crystal). The reproducibility of the glasses suggests that either the glass transition in hard spheres is not simply a kinetic phenomenon, or that the structural relaxation time in the fluid diverges near the glass transition density.