Comment on ``Quasisaddles as relevant points of the potential energy surface in the dynamics of supercooled liquids'' [J. Chem. Phys. 116, 10297 (2002); cond-mat/0203301]

摘要

Recently, the properties of supercooled liquids have been studied by mappinginstaneous configurations onto minima of the gradient squared. It wasoriginally suggested that this mapping would probe higher-order saddle pointsof the potential energy surface. However, it was subsequently shown that themajority of the minima of this function are only local minima and so do notcorrespond to saddles. In this comment, we provide a critique of the suggestionmade by Angelani et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 116, 10297 (2002); cond-mat/0203301]that although these minima are not true saddles, they are almost saddles (hencethe term quasisaddles). This issue has important implications for theinterpretation of the results obtained by this approach.