Local vs. cooperative: Unraveling glass transition mechanisms with SEER.

ABSTRACT: Which phenomenon slows down the dynamics in supercooled liquids and turns them into glasses is a long-standing question of condensed matter. Most popular theories posit that as the temperature decreases, many events must occur in a coordinated fashion on a growing length scale for relaxation to occur. Instead, other approaches consider that local barriers associated with the elementary rearrangement of a few particles or "excitations" govern the dynamics. To resolve this conundrum, our central result is to introduce an algorithm, Systematic Excitation ExtRaction, which can systematically extract hundreds of excitations and their energy from any given configuration. We also provide a measurement of the activation energy, characterizing the liquid dynamics, based on fast quenching and reheat

SUBMITTER: Pica Ciamarra M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11145278 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature