Landscapes and Fragilities

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between the potential energy landscape's features and the fragility of supercooled liquids, analyzing models and relations like Adam-Gibbs to understand what influences liquid behavior near glass transition.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of how landscape properties relate to fragility, highlighting limitations of current models and proposing insights into strong glass-forming behavior.

Findings

Fragility relates to landscape features but is not solely determined by basin properties.

The Adam-Gibbs relation links relaxation times to configurational entropy.

Different mechanisms can produce strong glass-forming behavior.

Abstract

The concept of fragility provides a possibility to rank different supercooled liquids on the basis of the temperature dependence of dynamic and/or thermodynamic quantities. We recall here the definitions of kinetic and thermodynamic fragility proposed in the last years and discuss their interrelations. At the same time we analyze some recently introduced models for the statistical properties of the potential energy landscape. Building on the Adam-Gibbs relation, which connects structural relaxation times to configurational entropy, we analyze the relation between statistical properties of the landscape and fragility. We call attention to the fact that the knowledge of number, energy depth and shape of the basins of the potential energy landscape may not be sufficient for predicting fragility. Finally, we discuss two different possibilities for generating strong behavior.