A glass is (broadly speaking) mostly composed of particles that very slowly move due to surrounding cages formed by the disordered structure of the neighbouring particles. A way to study the glass transition is to actually freeze-in a subset of the particles and observe how this induces changes to the slow relaxation and how this relates to the emergence of local order.
The freezing-in procedure (also called pinning) has a secondary important effect: the pinned liquid has a “simplified” configurational space, as many configurations become forbidden. The number of available configurations (and hence the configurational entropy of the liquid) is therefore reduced by the simple pinning procedure and if a thermodynamic origin of dynamical arrest is to be surmised, such a reduction would be a necessity.
Some years ago, Ian Williams designed a novel, clever way to pin large two-dimensional colloidal supercooled liquids. In an article recently accepted in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter we have shown that the technique allows us to observe the crossover from a free-flowing liquid to a pinned glass and that this is accompanied by very limited structural changes. However, if we map the configurational entropy of the experiments with the entropy measured from model numerical simulations, we do observe that accounting for the fraction of pinned particles leads to a reduction in the estimated configurational entropy.
Full reference:
I. Williams, F. Turci et al. (2018) Experimental determination of configurational entropy in a two-dimensional liquid under random pinning, J. Phys.: Condens. Matter in press https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-648X/aaa869
Francesco Turci 