Correlating structural order with structural rearrangement in dusty plasma liquids: can structural rearrangement be predicted by static structural information?

Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Nov 9;109(19):195002. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.195002. Epub 2012 Nov 7.

Abstract

Whether the static microstructural order information is strongly correlated with the subsequent structural rearrangement (SR) and their predicting power for SR are investigated experimentally in the quenched dusty plasma liquid with microheterogeneities. The poor local structural order is found to be a good alarm to identify the soft spot and predict the short term SR. For the site with good structural order, the persistent time for sustaining the structural memory until SR has a large mean value but a broad distribution. The deviation of the local structural order from that averaged over nearest neighbors serves as a good second alarm to further sort out the short time SR sites. It has the similar sorting power to that using the temporal fluctuation of the local structural order over a small time interval.