Correlating structural and dynamic fragility in glass-forming liquids

The glass transition was attracting wide interest over the last several decades, but still remains the topic of intensive research and discussions. One of the most intriguing and well-known observations is a drastic change of dynamic properties with only slight variations of structure upon cooling down to the glass transition temperature Tg. This has led many to believe that the changes of dynamics during approach to Tg have no structural signatures which would be significant and common to different types of glass-forming liquids. Here we demonstrate analysis of temperature dependence of the main diffraction peak in a static structure factor of various glass-formers. We show that the relative changes of its width with temperature correlates with fragility of these materials. This observation was analyzed using Adam-Gibbs approach establishing a connection between the structural and dynamical properties of glass-forming materials.