Non-affine deformations of inherent structure as signature of cooperativity in supercooled liquids

Abstract

We unveil the existence of non-affinely rearranging regions in the inherent structures (IS) of supercooled liquids by numerical simulations of two- and three-dimensional model glass formers subject to static shear deformations combined with local energy minimizations. In the liquid state IS, we find a broad distribution of rather large rearrangements which are correlated only over small distances. At low temperatures, the onset of the cooperative dynamics corresponds to much smaller displacements correlated over larger distances. This finding indicates the presence of non-affinely rearranging domains of relevant size in the IS deformation, which can be seen as the static counterpart of the cooperatively rearranging regions in the dynamics. This idea provides new insight into possible structural signatures of slow cooperative dynamics of supercooled liquids and supports the connections with elastic heterogeneities found in amorphous solids.

arXiv comment4 pages, 3 figures, revised version + auxiliary material, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett

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• Deformations, relaxation and broken symmetries in liquids, solids and glasses: a unified topological field theory
• Relevance of Shear Transformations in the Relaxation of Supercooled Liquids
• On the stupendous beauty of closure
• Deformation of inherent structures to detect long-range correlations in supercooled liquids
• Direct-space investigation of the ultraslow ballistic dynamics of a soft glass
• An energy-landscape-based crossover temperature in glass-forming liquids
• On the mechanism of the highly viscous flow
• Local elastic properties of polystyrene nanocomposites increase significantly due to non-affine deformations
• Multiscale Modeling and Coarse Graining of Polymer Dynamics: Simulations Guided by Statistical Beyond-Equilibrium Thermodynamics