Energy landscape approach to understanding systems beyond jamming

The dynamics and structure of systems beyond the glass and jamming transition have been of interest for a long time. The slow dynamics and complexity of these systems has restricted the ability to simulate them using conventional methods, particularly at low temperatures or high volume fractions. The properties of the low energy states are of particular importance to answering many fundamental questions surrounding the glass transition. In this study, we use an energy landscape based approach to probe the existence of such inherent structure athermal energies and provide an algorithm to explore the energy landscape The algorithm is inspired by metadynamics, and proceeds as a high dimensional basin filling algorithm that allows us to explore the energy landscape of a model soft-sphere foam system. We demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to reach low energies while revealing interesting characteristics about the nature of the landscape. We study how connected metabasins are organized relative to a starting energy minimum and their orientations relative to each other. Finally, we compare our method with conventionally used swap Monte Carlo that allows us to equilibrate glassy systems at lower temperatures by accessing lower energy portions of the energy landscape.