Scaling in soft spheres: fragility invariance on the repulsive potential softness

Abstract

We address the question of the dependence of the fragility of glass forming supercooled liquids on the softness of an interacting potential by performing numerical simulation of a binary mixture of soft spheres with different power n of the interparticle repulsive potential. We show that the temperature dependence of the diffusion coefficients for various $n$ collapses onto a universal curve, supporting the unexpected view that fragility is not related to the hard core repulsion. We also find that the configurational entropy correlates with the slowing down of the dynamics for all studied n.