Collaborative Research: A Data-Driven Statistical Approach to Aging and Elasticity in Colloidal Glasses

该研究项目的研究目标是从统计和微观角度了解玻璃材料老化的基本过程。 玻璃材料的老化是一个长期存在的问题：玻璃是一种不平衡的材料，因此其机械和电学性质会随着时间的推移而变化，但其微观原因仍然未知。 了解老化对延长由玻璃材料（“常规”玻璃和塑料）制成的产品的寿命具有意义。 该项目涉及玻璃系统的模拟，并将采用新的统计技术来重建材料的局部弹性特性。 我们将了解这些属性在老化过程中如何变化。 将对胶体玻璃进行补充实验，这是一种表现出老化的良好特征的模型系统。 由于实验所能获得的数据量有限，更重要的是，在系统老化到新的状态之前，我们所能获得的数据有限，因此我们需要从生物信息学和计量经济学中扩展统计技术，以便能够从我们的数据中获得相关信息。开发的统计技术将在老化或材料科学之外的各种应用中发挥作用。 同样重要的是了解玻璃体系中老化的基本机制，这可能对玻璃材料的生产方式产生长期影响。 参与该项目的学生将获得跨学科的经验，因为该项目融合了物理和工程，统计和软材料，统计力学理论和显微镜实验。 外联工作将针对匹兹堡地区人口不足的高中，并将通过“粘糊糊的物理”实地考察针对亚特兰大地区的K-12学生。

The research objective of this grant is to understand the fundamental process of aging of glassy materials from a statistical and microscopic point of view. Aging of glassy materials is a long standing problem: a glass is an out-of-equilibrium material, so its mechanical and electrical properties change over time, but the microscopic reasons for this are still unknown. Understanding aging has implications for extending the lifetime of products made from glassy materials (both "regular" glass and plastics). This project involves simulations of glassy systems and will employ novel statistical techniques to reconstruct local elastic properties of the material. We will learn how these properties change during the aging process. Complementary experiments will be conducted on colloidal glasses, a well-characterized model system which exhibits aging. Due to the limited amount of data the experiments can obtain - and more fundamentally, the limited data one can obtain before a system ages into a new state - we will need to extend statistical techniques from bioinformatics and econometrics to be able to the relevant information from our data.The developed statistical techniques will be useful in a variety of applications beyond aging or materials science. Of equal importance is understanding the fundamental mechanisms of aging in glassy systems, which may have a long-term impact on how glassy materials are produced. The students involved in this project will gain interdisciplinary experience, as the project merges physics and engineering, statistics and soft materials, statistical mechanics theory and microscopy experiments. Outreach efforts will target Pittsburgh area high schools with under-represented populations and will target Atlanta area K-12 students via "Squishy Physics" field trips.