2003/05/13 by L. Angelani, Luca Angelani, Giancarlo Ruocco +4 · 1 citation
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Chemistry #Computational chemistry #Energy (signal processing) #Energy landscape #Environmental science #Lennard-Jones potential #Material Dynamics and Properties #Molecular dynamics #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Physics #Statistical physics #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.1587132
published as J. Chem. Phys. 119, 2120 (2003) · 8 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2003/05/13 · openalex publication_date 2003/07/17 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Features of the energy landscape sampled by supercooled liquids are numerically analyzed for several Lennard-Jones-like model systems. The properties of quasisaddles (minima of the square gradient of potential energy W=|∇V|2), are shown to have a direct relationship with the dynamical behavior, confirming that the quasisaddle order extrapolates to zero at the mode-coupling temperature TMCT. The same result is obtained either analyzing all the minima of W or the saddles (absolute minima of W), supporting the conjectured similarity between quasisaddles and saddles, as far as the temperature dependence of the properties influencing the slow dynamics is concerned. We find evidence of universality in the shape of the landscape: plots for different systems superimpose into master curves, once energies and temperatures are scaled by TMCT. This allows to establish a quantitative relationship between TMCT and potential energy barriers for Lennard-Jones-like systems, and suggests a possible generalization to different model liquids.