Liquid landscape

摘要

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 issue Sastry, Debenedetti and Stillinger show how changes in the dynamic properties of glass-forming liquids can be related to changes in the nature of the system's underlying energy landscape.