Mixing effects for the structural relaxation in binary hard-sphere liquids

Abstract

We report extensive molecular-dynamics simulation results for binary mixtures of hard spheres for different size disparities and different mixing percentages,for packing fractions up to 0.605 and over a characteristic time interval spanning up to five orders in magnitude. We explore the changes in the evolution of glassy dynamics due to mixing and discover two opposite scenarios: for large size disparity, increasing the mixing percentage of small particles leads to a speed-up of long-time dynamics, while small disparity leads to a slowing down. These results agree with predictions based on the mode coupling theory for ideal glass transitions.