How Real are Liquid Groundstates? Ultra-Fast Crystal Growth and the Susceptibility of Energy Minima in Liquids

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the final structure of liquids' local groundstates depends on perturbations during energy minimization, linking structural susceptibility to ultra-fast crystal growth phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a measure of structural susceptibility that correlates with crystal growth speed and shows its increase with softened atomic interaction potentials.

Findings

Structural susceptibility correlates with crystal growth tendencies.

Susceptibility increases as atomic interactions are softened.

Final liquid structures depend on perturbation strength during minimization.

Abstract

We calculate the degree to which the final structure of the local groundstate in a liquid is a function of the strength of a perturbing potential applied during energy minimization. This structural susceptibility is shown to correlate well with the observed tendency of liquid adjacent to a crystal interface to exhibit a crystalline groundstate, a feature that has been strongly linked to the observation of ultra-fast crystal growth in pure metals and ionic melts. It is shown that the structural susceptibility increases dramatically as the interaction potential between atoms is softened.