The origin of persistent shear stress in supercooled liquids

The persistence of shear stress fluctuations in viscous liquids is a direct consequence of the non-zero shear stress of the local potential minima which couples stress relaxation to transitions between inherent structures. In simulations of 2D and 3D glass forming mixtures, we calculate the distribution of this inherent shear stress and demonstrate that the variance is independent of temperature and obeys a power law in density. The inherent stress is shown to involve only long wavelength fluctuations, evidence of the central role of the static boundary conditions in determining the residual stress left after the minimization of the potential energy. A temperature T-eta is defined to characterise the crossover from stress relaxation governed by binary collisions at high temperatures to low temperature relaxation dominated by the relaxation of the inherent stress. T-eta is found to coincide with the breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein scaling of diffusion and viscosity. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4730912]