Instantaneous normal modes of glass-forming liquids during the athermal relaxation process of the steepest descent algorithm
arXiv:2111.11681 · doi:10.1039/D3SM01104F
Abstract
Understanding glass formation by quenching remains a challenge in soft condensed matter physics. Recent numerical studies on steepest descent dynamics, which is one of the simplest models of quenching, revealed that quenched liquids undergo slow relaxation with a power law towards mechanical equilibrium and that the late stage of this process is governed by local rearrangements of particles. These advances motivate the detailed study of instantaneous normal modes during the relaxation process because the glassy dynamics is considered to be governed by stationary points of the potential energy landscape. Here, we performed a normal mode analysis of configurations during the steepest descent dynamics and found that the dynamics is driven by almost flat directions of the potential energy landscape at long times. These directions correspond to localized modes and we characterized them in terms of their statistics and structure using methods developed in the study of local minima of the potential energy landscape.
28 pages, 30 figures
References in corpus (10)
- Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
- Supercooled Liquids for Pedestrians
- Fractal free energy landscapes in structural glasses
- Scaling description of the yielding transition in soft amorphous solids at zero temperature
- Plastic Response of a 2D Lennard-Jones amorphous solid: Detailed analysis of the local rearrangements at very slow strain-rate
- Marginal Stability in Structural, Spin and Electron Glasses
- Low-energy quasilocalized excitations in structural glasses
- Relaxation dynamics in the energy landscape of glass-forming liquids
- Instantaneous Normal Modes Reveal Structural Signatures for the Herschel-Bulkley Rheology in Sheared Glasses
- Gas-liquid phase separation at zero temperature: mechanical interpretation and implications for gelation