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Thermodynamics

Liquid landscape

Nature volume 393, pages 521–523 (1998)Cite this article

Supercooled liquids — that is, liquids at temperatures below their normal freezing point — can undergo a subtle transition to a microscopically fixed, yet amorphous state: a glass. The temperature of this transition depends on how quickly the liquid is cooled, so it has seemed more natural to describe the process in terms of kinetics, rather than some immutable thermodynamics. But on page 554 of this issue1 Sastry, Debenedetti and Stillinger show how changes in the dynamic properties of glass-forming liquids2,3 can be related to changes in the nature of the system's underlying energy landscape.

‘Landscape paradigms’ are used to describe the qualitative behaviour of complex systems4. In such systems there are many metastable states, and many possible transitions between the different states. The system's state is represented by a point which moves on or above a surface, according to rules decided by the problem under consideration. The types of system described by the landscape model range from economics and evolution, through neural networks, spin glasses and proteins, to molecular clusters and viscous liquids. For each problem, the height of the surface may correspond to a different parameter — ‘fitness’ is to be maximized for an evolving species, for example; and some energy is to be minimized for a system of molecules. For the latter, the landscape topology controls the kinetics5, and the average energy of the minima visited at temperature T reflects the thermodynamics.

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Figure 1: Three angles on glass.

References

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  1. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Box 87 1604, Tempe, 85287-1604, Arizona, USA

    Austen Angell

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Angell, A. Liquid landscape. Nature 393, 521–523 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/31110

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