Non-topographic description of inherent structure dynamics in glass formers

TL;DR

This paper proposes a non-topographic, purely dynamical approach to understanding the inherent structure dynamics in glass formers, emphasizing dynamical heterogeneities and validated through models and data comparison.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-topographic perspective on inherent structure dynamics, supported by models and data, diverging from traditional potential energy landscape analyses.

Findings

Dynamical heterogeneities are key to understanding structure dynamics.

The non-topographic approach aligns with experimental and numerical data.

Models successfully predict local dynamics in supercooled liquids.

Abstract

We show that the dynamics between inherent structures in glass forming systems can be understood in purely dynamical terms, without any reference to ``topographic'' features of the potential energy landscape. This ``non-topographic'' interpretation is based instead on the existence of dynamical heterogeneities and on their statistical properties. Our view is supported by the study of simple dynamically facilitated models of glass formers. These models also allow for the formulation of quantitative theoretical predictions which are successfully compared to published data obtained in numerical and experimental studies of local dynamics of supercooled liquids.