An Overview on Short and Long Time Relaxations in Glass-forming Supercooled Liquids

Density fluctuations in supercooled liquids near the glass transition relax in multiple steps. The short time relaxation is known as β-relaxation and the final long time relaxation is called α-relaxation. It is believed that the long time α-relaxation is a cooperative phenomena associated with a growing length scales, whereas the short-time β-relaxation is often attributed to spatially local processes involving the rattling motion of a particle in the transient cage formed by its neighbors. Using molecular dynamics simulations of few model glass-forming liquids, we show that the β-relaxation is also cooperative in nature and the length scale extracted from the detailed finite-size scaling analysis of β-relaxation is found to be the same as that of the length scale that describes the spatial heterogeneity of local dynamics in the long-time α-relaxation regime. These results provide a clear connection between short-time dynamics and long-time structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids.