Fig. 5.

Cooperative uncaging drives intermittent dynamics. (A) Kinetic energy per particle within a raft during a representative sequence of avalanches over a time span of 1.65 s, with zoomed-in detail for one avalanche (boxed in red). Dashed horizontal lines: kinetic energy per particle averaged over 10 s. Marked points correspond to the snapshots shown in B. Insetsi and ii: Voronoi construction of the cluster configuration before and after the avalanche. Light and dark blue represent the defects with 5 and 7 neighbors. (B) Spatiotemporal evolution of the raft during the avalanche highlighted in A. Arrows denote the displacement field from time t₀ before the event. Particles are shown at their t₀ locations and colored with their current values of E_kin/⟨E_kin⟩. (C) Normalized mean square displacement ⟨(Δr/L)²⟩ as a function of normalized time t/t^* for both experiment and MD simulation. L denotes the lattice spacing, and t^* = L/⟨v⟩. (D) Correlation parameter ⟨γ⟩ (Eq. 2) as a function of t/t^*. The schematic shows the definition of γ, with angular weighting function $w_{\mathit{ij}}={({\widehat{n}}_i·{\widehat{r}}_{\mathit{ij}})}^2$ depicted by the shaded area; directions parallel to the particle motion are weighted more heavily. (E) Fraction of uncaged particles in a raft, N_u/N_t, as a function of t/t^*. N_u and N_t are the uncaged and total particle number, respectively. A particle is considered uncaged if the displacement from time t₀ is greater than ⟨v⟩t^*. The shaded area represents the SD from 10 independent avalanche events in the same raft.