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

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.