3:45 PM
4:45 PM
Recent mean field results in the study of structural glasses have demonstrated the existence of a phase transition that happens within the glass phase, called the Gardner transition. This transition describes a change in the energy landscape from smooth to fractally rough with a heirarchical structure. We report on the first direct experimental evidence of such a transition in colloidal glasses as well as new simulational results in low dimensional finite size systems. Experimentally, we track the motion of a single particle within a densifying colloidal glass and observe an abrupt transition from caged to logarithmically growing mean squared displacements, a signature of this transition. Numerically, we directly probe the structure of the energy landscape and find it to be both heirarchical and ultrametric.