Correlations Between Short- and Long-time Relaxation in Colloidal Supercooled Liquids and Glasses

Spatiotemporal dynamics of short- and long-time structural relaxation are measured experimentally as a function of packing fraction, phi, in quasi-two-dimensional colloidal supercooled liquids and glasses. The relaxation times associated with long-time dynamic heterogeneity and short-time intracage motion are found to be strongly correlated and to grow by orders of magnitude with increasing phi toward dynamic arrest. We find that clusters of fast particles on the two timescales often overlap, and, interestingly, the distribution of minimum-spatial-separation between closest nonoverlapping clusters across the two timescales is revealed to be exponential with a decay length that increases with phi. In total, the experimental observations suggest short-time relaxation events are very often precursors to heterogeneous relaxation at longer timescales in glassy materials.