Modeling the relaxation of fluctuations in glass during the Ritland crossover experiment

A knowledge of fluctuations is crucial for understanding the long-term kinetics of glasses. However, current approaches for modeling relaxation rely on an order parameter that only approximates the physics of relaxation. In this work, we compare a standard relaxation model with a newly proposed model in terms of their ability to capture the evolution of the glass. The results reveal that the concept of fictive temperature is unable to account for relaxation behavior of fluctuations. The newly proposed method, called the toy landscape model, can capture fluctuations but at a loss of simplicity. Graphical abstract