Propensity sImulations with polydisperse particles in advance of experimental propensity measurements.

We present our findings from our recently published work on simulations of the Kob-Andersen binary glassformer in a series of isoconfigurational (IC) ensembles. This follows the work of Widmer-Cooper et al, (2004), where they used such an ensemble to define the propensity of each particle as the average motion of the particle, where the averaging is done across the ensemble. Our focus was on introducing polydispersity to the particle sizes in anticipation of creating IC ensembles with a binary mixture of silica particles. Our simulations indicated that meaningful measurements of propensity should be possible when each component of a binary mixture has commercially available levels of polydispersity. However, we also found that care must be taken in constructing each member of the IC ensemble as particles could not be considered indistinguishable due to the size variation within each of the binary species. We will also share our work to date on creating such an ensemble using a holographic optical tweezer system.