Accelerated dynamics of supercooled glycerol in soft confinement

We investigate the dynamics of supercooled glycerol in a soft confinement within microemulsion droplets. The structure of the system is characterized by small-angle neutron scattering. We show that temperature-stable droplets establish a confinement, which may be varied in size from about 1 to 10 nm. Subsequently we focus on the dynamics of glass-forming glycerol confined within nanodroplets of different sizes. By combining neutron backscattering and time-of-flight for a broad dynamic range we obtain the incoherent intermediate scattering function S ( q , t ) , which reveals increasingly accelerated dynamics as glycerol is confined to smaller droplets and for the relaxation times a crossover from Vogel–Fulcher behavior in the bulk to an Arrhenius law in confinement.