Universal Features of Dynamic Heterogeneity in Supercooled Liquids

A few years ago it was shown that some systems that have very similar local structure, as quantified by the pair correlation function, exhibit vastly different slowing down upon supercooling. Recently, a more subtle structural quantity, the so-called point-to-set length, was found to reliably correlate with the average dynamics. Here we use computer simulations to examine the behavior of fluctuations around the average dynamics, i.e., dynamic heterogeneity. We study five model glass-forming liquids: three model liquids used in previous works and two additional model liquids with finite range interactions. Some of these systems have very similar local structure but vastly different dynamics. We show that for all these systems the spatial extent and the anisotropy of dynamic heterogeneity have the same correlation with the average dynamics. This result complements a recent experimental finding of a universal correlation between the number of correlated particles and the apparent activation enthalpy.