String-like Rearrangements Induce Mobility in Supercooled Liquids

Abstract

Dynamical heterogeneity is a signature phenomenon of deeply supercooled liquids and glasses. Here, we demonstrate that the spatiotemporal correlations between local relaxation events that underpin it are the result of local relaxation events raising the likelihood that other relaxation events subsequently occur nearby, confirming a widely held, but until now unsubstantiated, belief that dynamical facilitation is responsible for dynamical heterogeneity. We find that mobility is propagated through the entrainment of particles into elementary string-like rearrangements, known as microstrings, and not through perturbing the structure surrounding these rearrangements.