What does the potential energy landscape tell us about the dynamics of supercooled liquids and glasses?

TL;DR

This paper uses computer simulations to analyze the potential energy landscape of a glass-former, revealing how metabasins influence the slowing down of dynamics in supercooled liquids and glasses.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of metabasins in PEL analysis and links their properties to the dynamic behavior of supercooled liquids and glasses.

Findings

Existence of two types of metabasins: liquid-like and trap-like.

Activated escape from trap-like metabasins governs slow dynamics.

Metabasin analysis extends understanding of glass transition over broader temperature ranges.

Abstract

For a model glass-former we demonstrate via computer simulations how macroscopic dynamic quantities can be inferred from a PEL analysis. The essential step is to consider whole superstructures of many PEL minima, called metabasins, rather than single minima. We show that two types of metabasins exist: some allowing for quasi-free motion on the PEL (liquid-like), the others acting as traps (solid-like). The activated, multi-step escapes from the latter metabasins are found to dictate the slowing down of dynamics upon cooling over a much broader temperature range than is currently assumed.