7 January, 2010

The potential energy landscape approach to understanding glass forming liquids

Abstract

These lectures will review attempts to understand the properties of supercooled liquids in terms of the potential energy landscape they sample as they are cooled to low temperatures. After an initial discussion of the intuitive picture that leads to a focus on the energy landscape in attempts to understand complex dynamics, an brief description will be given on how the thermodynamics of a liquid can be formulated in terms of the local potential energy minima, or inherent structures. Methods by which the statistical properties of the landscape may be quantified will be discussed, followed by a survey of results pertaining to the connection between the changes in the properties of the landscape sampled and the dynamical behavior of liquids. Extensions of this approach to out of equilibrium behavior and the study of metabasins will be discussed. Finally, the merits and limitations of these approaches, and the current state of investigations in this direction, will be summarized.

References and suggested reading

  1. F. Sciortino, Lecture notes for the School on ``Unifying Concepts in Glass Physics III'' Bangalore, June 2004, J. Stat. Mech., P05015 (2005)
  2. A. Heuer, J. Phys. Cond. Mat., 20, 373101 (2008)
  3. "Energy Landscapes" by D.J. Wales, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge) (2003)
  4. D.J. Wales et. al., Adv. Chem. Phys., 115, 1, (2000)