Hopping in a supercooled Lennard-Jones liquid: metabasins, waiting time distribution, and diffusion

We investigate the jump motion among potential energy minima of a Lennard-Jones model glass former by extensive computer simulation. From the time series of minima energies, it becomes clear that the energy landscape is organized in superstructures called metabasins. We show that diffusion can be pictured as a random walk among metabasins, and that the whole temperature dependence resides in the distribution of waiting times. The waiting time distribution exhibits algebraic decays: tau(-1/2) for very short times and tau(-alpha) for longer times, where alpha approximately 2 near T(c). We demonstrate that solely the waiting times in the very stable basins account for the temperature dependence of the diffusion constant.