Using the s ensemble to probe glasses formed by cooling and aging

From length scale distributions characterizing frozen amorphous domains, we relate the s ensemble method with standard cooling and aging protocols for forming glass. We show that in a class of models where space-time scaling is in harmony with that of experiment, the spatial distributions of excitations obtained with the s ensemble are identical to those obtained through cooling or aging, but the computational effort for applying the s ensemble is generally many orders of magnitude smaller than that of straightforward numerical simulation of cooling or aging. We find that in contrast to the equilibrium ergodic state, a nonequilibrium length scale characterizes the anticorrelation between excitations and encodes the preparation history of glass states.