Saddles in the energy landscape probed by supercooled liquids
Abstract
We numerically investigate the supercooled dynamics of two simple model liquids exploiting the partition of the multi-dimension configuration space in basins of attraction of the stationary points (inherent saddles) of the potential energy surface. We find that the inherent saddles order and potential energy are well defined functions of the temperature T. Moreover, decreasing T, the saddle order vanishes at the same temperature (TMCT) where the inverse diffusivity appears to diverge as a power law. This allows a topological interpretation of TMCT: it marks the transition from a dynamics between basins of saddles (T>TMCT) to a dynamics between basins of minima (T<TMCT).
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