Specific heat anomaly in a supercooled liquid with amorphous boundary conditions

Abstract

We study the specific heat of a model supercooled liquid confined in a spherical cavity with amorphous boundary conditions. We find the equilibrium specific heat has a cavity-size-dependent peak as a function of temperature. The cavity allows us to perform a finite-size scaling (FSS) analysis, which indicates that the peak persists at a finite temperature in the thermodynamic limit. We attempt to collapse the data onto a FSS curve according to different theoretical scenarios, obtaining reasonable results in two cases: a "not-so-simple" liquid with nonstandard values of the exponents α and ν, and random first-order theory, with two different length scales.

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