Understanding the Fragile-to-Strong Transition in Silica from Microscopic Dynamics

In this work, we revisit the fragile-to-strong transition (FTS) in the simulated BKS silica from the perspective of microscopic dynamics in an effort to elucidate the dynamical behaviors of fragile and strong glass-forming liquids. Softness, which is a machine-learned feature from local atomic structures, is used to predict the microscopic activation energetics and long-term dynamics. The FTS is found to originate from a change in the temperature dependence of the microscopic activation energetics. Furthermore, results suggest there are two diffusion channels with different energy barriers in BKS silica. The fast dynamics at high temperatures is dominated by the channel with small energy barriers (<∼1  eV), which is controlled by the short-range order. The rapid closing of this diffusion channel when lowering temperature leads to the fragile behavior. On the other hand, the slow dynamics at low temperatures is dominated by the channel with large energy barriers controlled by the medium-range order. This slow diffusion channel changes only subtly with temperature, leading to the strong behavior. The distributions of barriers in the two channels show different temperature dependences, causing a crossover at ∼3100  K. This transition temperature in microscopic dynamics is consistent with the inflection point in the configurational entropy, suggesting there is a fundamental correlation between microscopic dynamics and thermodynamics.