Landscape equivalent of the shoving model

Abstract

It is shown that the shoving model expression for the average relaxation time of viscous liquids, according to which the activation energy is proportional to the instantaneous shear modulus, follows largely from a classical “landscape” estimation of barrier heights from curvature at energy minima. Although the activation energy in this reasoning involves both instantaneous bulk and shear moduli, the bulk modulus contributes less than 8% to the temperature dependence of the activation energy. This reflects the fact that the physics of the two models are closely related. © 2004 The American Physical Society.