Characterizing the cage state of glassy systems and its sensitivity to frozen boundaries

TL;DR

This study investigates the cage state's role in predicting glassy dynamics, revealing its increasing sensitivity to long-range structural effects near the glass transition, and highlighting its potential link to structural length scales.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the cage state's properties and its dependence on boundary conditions, enhancing understanding of structure-dynamics relationships in glassy systems.

Findings

Cage state becomes more influenced by long-range effects near the glass transition.

Long-range structural effects improve the cage state's predictive power.

Cage state may be linked to an amorphous structural length scale.

Abstract

Understanding the role that structure plays in the dynamical arrest observed in glassy systems remains an open challenge. Over the last decade, machine learning (ML) strategies have emerged as an important tool for probing this structure-dynamics relationship, particularly for predicting heterogeneous glassy dynamics from local structure. A recent advancement is the introduction of the cage state, a structural quantity that captures the average positions of particles while rearrangements are forbidden. During the caging regime, linear models trained on the cage state have been shown to outperform more complex ML methods trained on initial configurations only. In this paper, we explore the properties associated with the cage state in more detail to better understand why it serves as such an effective predictor for the dynamics. Specifically, we examine how the cage state in a binary hard-sphere mixture is influenced by both packing fraction and boundary conditions. Our results reveal that, as the system approaches the glassy regime, the cage state becomes increasingly influenced by long-range structural effects. This influence is evident both in its predictive power for particle dynamics and in the internal structure of the cage state, suggesting that the CS might be associated with some form of an amorphous growing structural length scale.