Dynamics of inherent structure in supercooled liquids near kinetic glass transition - art. no. 031202

We present a description of the dynamics of a supercooled binary Lennard-Jo nes liquid in term of the potential landscape of the system. The slowing do wn of the dynamics in supercooled liquids near the kinetic glass transition is related to the existence of basins in the potential landscape. The inhe rent structures that are the local potential minima in the configuration sp ace obtained by a quench process are employed to represent the configuratio ns of the basins. We present time correlation functions of the inherent str ucture. both the self and the coherent part, as a function of wave vector. We also calculated the mean-square displacement, and the non-Gaussian param eter of the van Hove self-correlation function. Compared with the dynamics of original configurations. the short-time relaxation has almost been elimi nated by the quench process. However, the long-time a relaxations remain es sentially the same. We conclude that the long-time a relaxation is the resu lt of cross-basin transition in the potential landscape in the configuratio n space.