Residual stresses are well-known companions of all glassy materials. They affect and, in many cases, even strongly modify important material properties like the mechanical response and the optical transparency. The mechanisms through which stresses affect such properties are, in many cases, still under study, and their full understanding can pave the way to a full exploitation of stress as a primary control parameter. It is, for example, known that stresses promote particle mobility at small length scales, e.g., in colloidal glasses, gels, and metallic glasses, but this connection still remains essentially qualitative. Exploiting a preparation protocol that leads to colloidal glasses with an exceptionally directional built-in stress field, we characterize the stress-induced dynamics and show that it can be visualized as a collection of “flickering,” mobile regions with linear sizes of the order of ≈20 particle diameters (≈2 μm here) that move cooperatively, displaying an overall stationary but locally ballistic dynamics.

残余应力是所有玻璃材料的众所周知的同伴。它们会影响甚至在许多情况下甚至强烈地改变重要的材料特性，例如机械响应和光学透明度。在许多情况下，应力影响此类特性的机制仍在研究中，它们的充分理解可以为充分利用应力作为主要控制参数铺平道路。例如，已知应力在小尺度上促进了颗粒的迁移，例如在胶体玻璃，凝胶和金属玻璃中，但是这种连接仍然本质上保持定性。利用制备协议，使胶体玻璃具有异常定向的内置应力场，我们表征了应力诱导的动力学，并表明可以将其可视化为“闪烁，