Reproducibility of dynamical heterogeneities and metabasin dynamics in glass forming liquids: The influence of structure on dynamics

The discovery that the propensity for particle motion in a supercooled liquid is completely determined by the initial structure pointed to the existence of a causal link between structure and dynamics in glassy systems. Here we demonstrate that this underlying influence of structure is only local in time, fading out beyond the metabasin lifetime much before the alpha relaxation time. Thus, our results reveal the irreproducibility of metabasin dynamics and support the scenario of a random walk on metabasins for the long time diffusion.