(593f) [Invited Talk] Re-Entrant Dynamics and Anomalous Fluctuations in Strongly Confined Liquids

The dynamics of liquids become increasingly heterogeneous in space and time as their glass transition is approached. These spatial heterogeneities are thought to be connected to a growing length scale over which dynamics are correlated. Confining liquids inside a thin geometry modifies the dynamics and introduces a competing length scale characterizing the extent of confinement. Here, we investigate the consequences of confinement on the dynamics on polydisperse hard-sphere liquids confined in small slit pores using simulation. We show that these systems exhibit re-entrant dynamics resulting from a growing static length scale associated with local structural ordering in the liquid. Our simulations also reveal that these confined liquids exhibit long-wavelength fluctuations that decay in magnitude as the extent of confinement in decreased. We discuss the broader implications of these two unusual behaviors and their connections with those observed in two- and three-dimensional bulk systems.