Thermodynamic equivalence of cyclic shear and deep cooling in glass formers.

Abstract

The extreme slowing down associated with glass formation in experiments and in simulations results in serious difficulties to prepare deeply quenched, well annealed, glassy material. Recently, methods to achieve such deep quenching were proposed, including vapor deposition on the experimental side and "swap Monte Carlo" and oscillatory shearing on the simulation side. The relation between the resulting glasses under different protocols remains unclear. Here we show that oscillatory shear and swap Monte Carlo result in thermodynamically equivalent glasses sharing the same statistical mechanics and similar mechanical responses under external strain.