Structure of quantum supercooled liquids.

Abstract

Supercooled liquids show a drastic slowdown in the dynamics with decreasing temperature, while their structure remains similar to that of normal liquids. In this paper, the structural features in a quantum supercooled liquid are explored in terms of cages defined using the Voronoi polyhedra and characterized in terms of their volumes and geometries. The cage volume fluctuations are sensitive to the quantum effects, and decrease as the glass transition is approached by varying the quantumness. This is in contrast to the classical case where the volumes are insensitive to temperature variations as one approaches the transition. The cage geometry becomes more spherical upon increasing quantumness from zero, pushing the system closer to the glass transition. The cage geometry is found to be significantly correlated with asymmetry in the position uncertainty of the caged particle in the strongly quantum regime.