Lack of Stability in the Stillinger-Weber Analysis, and a Stable Analysis of the Potential Energy Landscape

TL;DR

This paper critiques the instability of the Stillinger-Weber analysis of potential energy landscapes and proposes a new, stable approach based on complexity that varies monotonically with temperature.

Contribution

It identifies the instability in the Stillinger-Weber analysis and introduces a novel, stable method using complexity to describe the energy landscape.

Findings

Stillinger-Weber analysis is unstable as free energy slope and curvature vanish simultaneously.

The new complexity-based analysis provides a stable description of the energy landscape.

Complexity increases monotonically with temperature in the new model.

Abstract

We examine the Stillinger-Weber analysis of the potential energy landscape for its stability and conclude that it does not provide a stable description of the system as the free energy slope and curvature vanish simultaneously. An alternative analysis developed recently by us involving complexity provides a stable description with complexity a monotonic increasing function of temperature.