Excitation-facilitated hops play a dominant role in relaxation and transport of liquids even above T_A

It is widely believed that particle hopping is an important mechanism for transport and relaxation in the supercooled and glassy regimes of liquids. Using commonly employed methods to identify hops in real space, they are not evident at high temperatures (above T_A), where relaxation follows an Arrhenius law, and are thus thought to be unimportant above this temperature. Employing reciprocal space analysis through the intermediate scattering function we not only identify excitations and hops above T_A, we show that they are also a central relaxation and transport pathway in this high-temperature range.