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Updated: Jul 4, 2025

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Instantaneous normal modes of glass-forming liquids during the athermal relaxation process of the steepest descent
Masanari Shimada1, Kumpei Shiraishi2, Hideyuki Mizuno3
1Department of Physics, Toronto Metropolitan University, M5B 2K3, Toronto, Canada. masanari.shimada@torontomu.ca.
Abstract:
Understanding glass formation by quenching remains a challenge in soft condensed matter physics. Recent numerical studies on steepest descent dynamics, which is one of the simplest models of quenching, revealed that quenched liquids undergo slow relaxation with a power law towards mechanical equilibrium and that the late stage of this process is governed by local rearrangements of particles. These advances motivate the detailed study of instantaneous normal modes during the relaxation process because the glassy dynamics is considered to be governed by stationary points of the potential energy landscape. Here, we performed a normal mode analysis of configurations during the steepest descent dynamics and found that the dynamics is driven by almost flat directions of the potential energy landscape at long times. These directions correspond to localized modes and we characterized them in terms of their statistics and structure using methods developed in the study of local minima of the potential energy landscape.
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