Soft Modes and Nonaffine Rearrangements in the Inherent Structures of Supercooled Liquids

We find that the hierarchical organization of the potential energy landscape in a model supercooled liquid can be related to a change in the spatial distribution of soft normal modes. For groups of nearby minima, between which fast relaxation processes typically occur, the localization of the soft modes is very similar. The spatial distribution of soft regions changes, instead, for minima between which transitions relevant to structural relaxation occur. This may be the reason why the soft modes are able to predict spatial heterogeneities in the dynamics. Nevertheless, the very softest modes are only weakly correlated with dynamical heterogeneities and instead show higher statistical overlap with regions in the local minima that would undergo nonaffine rearrangements if subjected to a shear deformation. This feature of the supercooled liquid is reminiscent of the behavior of nonaffine deformations in amorphous solids, where the very softest modes identify the loci of plastic instabilities.