What Does the Potential Energy Landscape Tell Us about the Dynamics of Supercooled Liquids and Glasses?

2003/06/12 by Burkhard Doliwa, B. Doliwa, Andreas Heuer · 6 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.91.235501

arxiv created 2003/06/12 · openalex publication_date 2003/12/02 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

For a model glass former we demonstrate via computer simulations how macroscopic dynamic quantities can be inferred from a potential energy landscape (PEL) analysis. The essential step is to consider whole superstructures of many PEL minima, called metabasins, rather than single minima. We show that two types of metabasins exist: some allowing for quasifree motion on the PEL (liquidlike), and the others acting as traps (solidlike). The activated, multistep escapes from the latter metabasins are found to dictate the slowing down of dynamics upon cooling over a much broader temperature range than is currently assumed.

Citations

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