Anomalous slowing down in the metastable liquid of hard spheres.

It is demonstrated that a straightforward extension of the Arrhenius law accurately describes diffusion in the thermodynamically stable liquid of hard spheres. A sharp negative deviation from this behavior is observed as the liquid is compressed beyond its stability limit. This dynamical anomaly can be compared with the nonlinear slowing down characteristic of the supercooled dynamics regime in liquids with continuous interaction. It is suggested that the observed dynamical transition is caused by long-time decomposition of the configuration space. This interpretation is corroborated by the observation of characteristic anomalies in the geometry of a particle trajectory in the metastable domain.