Energy landscape-driven non-equilibrium evolution of inherent structure in disordered material

Complex states in glasses can be neatly expressed by the potential energy landscape (PEL). However, because PEL is highly multi-dimensional it is difficult to describe how the system moves around in PEL. Here we demonstrate that it is possible to predict the evolution of macroscopic state in a metallic glass, such as ageing and rejuvenation, through a set of simple equations describing excitations in the PEL. The key to this simplification is the realization that the step of activation from the initial state to the saddle point in PEL and the following step of relaxation to the final state are essentially decoupled. The model shows that the interplay between activation and relaxation in PEL is the key driving force that simultaneously explains both the equilibrium of supercooled liquid and the thermal hysteresis observed in experiments. It further predicts anomalous peaks in truncated thermal scanning, validated by independent molecular dynamics simulation.