Equilibrium ultrastable glasses produced by random pinning

TL;DR

This study introduces a simple method to create ultrastable glasses in simulations by randomly pinning particles, enabling detailed analysis of their melting behavior and stability without complex preparation protocols.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that random pinning efficiently produces ultrastable glasses in atomistic simulations, avoiding structural changes and allowing kinetic studies.

Findings

Pinning a small fraction of particles yields ultrastable configurations.

Enhanced stability correlates with large-scale dynamic heterogeneity.

Melting behavior varies with geometry, showing homogeneous and heterogeneous regimes.

Abstract

Ultrastable glasses have risen to prominence due to their potentially useful material properties and the tantalizing possibility of a general method of preparation via vapor deposition. Despite the importance of this novel class of amorphous materials, numerical studies have been scarce because achieving ultrastability in atomistic simulations is an enormous challenge. Here we bypass this difficulty and establish that randomly pinning the position of a small fraction of particles inside an equilibrated supercooled liquid generates ultrastable configurations at essentially no numerical cost, while avoiding undesired structural changes due to the preparation protocol. Building on the analogy with vapor-deposited ultrastable glasses, we study the melting kinetics of these configurations following a sudden temperature jump into the liquid phase. In homogeneous geometries, we find that enhanced kinetic stability is accompanied by large scale dynamic heterogeneity, while a competition between homogeneous and heterogeneous melting is observed when a liquid boundary invades the glass at constant velocity. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale, atomistically resolved, and experimentally relevant simulations of the kinetics of ultrastable glasses.