Local dynamics in liquids and glassy materials

Atomic dynamics in strongly disordered matter, such as liquids and glasses, is characterized by correlated local dynamics. The conventional descriptions of atomic dynamics in condensed matter in terms of phonons and diffusion are inadequate for their dynamics, and instead we have to describe the dynamics in terms of spatial and temporal atomic correlations. Experimentally this means that it is insufficient to describe the dynamics through the dispersion of collective excitations in the dynamic structure factor, S(Q,E), where Q and E are the momentum and energy exchanges in scattering. As an alternative we propose a real-space description in terms of the dynamic pair-density function (DyPDF) and the Van Hove function (VHF), and discuss recent results on relaxor ferroelectrics and superfluid ⁴He measured by inelastic neutron scattering and water by inelastic x-ray scattering. As the subjects of research in condensed matter physics and materials science turn to more complex materials, the real-space approach is likely to become the mainstream method of research in atomic dynamics. (author)