Correlating Ultrastability with Fragility and Surface Mobility in Vapor Deposited Tetrahedral Glasses

Several experiments on molecular and metallic glasses have shown that the ability of vapor deposition to produce ultrastable glasses is correlated to their structural and thermodynamic properties. Here we investigate the vapor deposition of a class of tetrahedral materials (including silicon and water) via molecular dynamics simulations of the generalized Stillinger–Weber potential. By changing a single parameter that controls the local tetrahedrality, we show that the emergence of ultrastable behavior is correlated with an increase in the fragility of the model. At the same time, while the mobility of the surface compared to the bulk shows only slight changes at low temperature, with increasing the tetrahedrality, it displays a significant enhancement toward the glass transition temperature. Our results point toward a strong connection between bulk dynamics, surface dynamics, and glass-ultrastability ability in this class of materials.