Influence of the Potential Energy Landscape on the Equilibration and Specific Heat of Glass Forming Liquids

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the glass transition can be understood through the energy landscape, where slow dynamics cause the specific heat to increase over long measurement times, indicating delayed equilibration.

Contribution

It reveals how the energy landscape influences equilibration and specific heat behavior in glass-forming liquids, emphasizing the role of measurement timescales.

Findings

Specific heat increases with longer measurement times below the glass transition.

Glass transition linked to slow exploration of the energy landscape.

Equilibration times can be much longer than previously thought.

Abstract

We show that a glass transition, signaled by a peak in the specific heat vs. temperature, can occur because a glassy system that shows no signs of aging progresses so slowly through the energy landscape that the time needed to obtain an accurate estimate of the thermodynamic averages exceeds the observation time. We find that below the glass transition temperature of a three dimensional binary mixture of soft spheres, the specific heat increases with measurement time spans orders of magnitude longer than previously recognized equilibration times.