Saddles and softness in simple model liquids

TL;DR

This study investigates the properties of saddle points in the potential energy landscape of soft sphere liquids with varying softness, revealing universal scaling behaviors when energies and temperatures are normalized by the mode-coupling temperature.

Contribution

It extends previous findings by demonstrating that saddle-based quantities in soft sphere models follow universal scaling laws similar to Lennard-Jones models.

Findings

Saddle properties rescale into master curves across different softness levels.

Scaling involves energies and temperatures normalized by T_MCT.

Results confirm generality of previous Lennard-Jones findings.

Abstract

We report a numerical study of saddles properties of the potential energy landscape for soft spheres with different softness, i.e. different power n of the interparticle repulsive potential. We find that saddle-based quantities rescale into master curves once energies and temperatures are scaled by mode-coupling temperature T_MCT, confirming and generalizing previous findings obtained for Lennard-Jones like models.