Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the abrupt slowdown of structural relaxation. However, it still remains elusive whether there is an underlying link between structural relaxation and dynamic heterogeneity. Here, we unravel the link by introducing a characteristic time scale hiding behind an identical dynamic heterogeneity for various model glass-forming liquids. We find that the time scale corresponds to the kinetic fragility of liquids. Moreover, it leads to scaling collapse of both the structural relaxation time and dynamic heterogeneity for all liquids studied, together with a characteristic temperature associated with the same dynamic heterogeneity. Our findings imply that studying the glass transition from the viewpoint of dynamic heterogeneity is more informative than expected.

中文翻译：

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揭示玻璃形成液体中结构弛豫与动态异质性之间的联系

尽管使用眼镜已有数千年的历史，但玻璃过渡的本质仍然是神秘的。人们一直认为，在接近玻璃化转变时，动态异质性的增长在解释结构弛豫的突然减缓中起着关键作用。然而，在结构弛豫和动态异质性之间是否存在潜在的联系仍然是难以捉摸的。在这里，我们通过引入隐藏在各种模型玻璃成型液的相同动态异质性背后的特征时间标尺来解开该链接。我们发现时间尺度与液体的动力学脆性相对应。此外，对于所有研究的液体，它都会导致结构弛豫时间和动态异质性的结垢崩溃，以及与相同动态异质性相关的特征温度。我们的发现表明，从动态异质性的角度研究玻璃化转变比提供预期的信息多。