The study of supercooled liquids and glasses remains one of the most divisive and divided fields in modern physics. Despite a vast amount of effort and research time invested in this topic, the answers to many central questions remain disputed and incomplete. However, the link between the behaviour of supercooled liquids and their energy landscapes is well established and widely accepted. Understanding this link would be a key step towards resolving many of the mysteries and controversies surrounding the glass transition. Therefore the study of glassy energy landscapes is an important area of research. In this thesis, I report some of the most detailed computational studies of glassy potential energy landscapes ever performed. Using geometry optimisation techniques, I have sampled the local minima and saddle points of the landscapes for several supercooled liquids to analyse their dynamics and thermodynamics. Some of my analysis follows previous work on the binary Lennard-Jones fluid (BLJ), a model atomic liquid. BLJ is a fragile glass former, meaning that its transport coefficients have super-Arrhenius temperature dependence, rather than the more usual Arrhenius behaviour exhibited by strong liquids. The difference in behaviour between these two classes of liquid has previously been attributed to differing degrees of structure in the relevant energy landscapes. I have studied models for both fragile and strong glass formers: the molecular liquid ortho-terphenyl (OTP) and viscous silica (SiO$_{2}$) respectively. My results for OTP agree closely with trends observed for BLJ, suggesting that the same diffusion mechanism is applicable to fragile molecular liquids as well as to atomic. However, the dynamics and energy landscape of OTP are made complicated by the molecular orientational degrees of freedom, making the analysis more challenging for this system. Dynamics of BLJ, OTP and silica are all dominated by cage-breaking events: structural rearrangements in which atoms change their nearest neighbours. I propose a robust and general method to identify cage breaks for small rigid molecules, and compare some properties of cage breaks between strong and fragile systems. The energy landscapes of BLJ and OTP both display hierarchical ordering of potential energy minima into metabasins. These metabasins can be detected by the cage-breaking method. It has previously been suggested that metabasins are responsible for super-Arrhenius behaviour, and are absent from the landscapes of strong liquids such as SiO2. My results indicate that metabasins are present on the silica landscape, but that they each contain fewer minima than metabasins in BLJ or OTP. Metabasins are associated with anticorrelated particle motion, mediated by reversed transitions between minima of the potential energy landscape. I show that accounting for time-correlation of particle displacement vectors is essential to describe super-Arrhenius behaviour in BLJ and OTP, but also required to reproduce strong behaviour in silica. I hypothesise that the difference between strong and fragile liquids arises from a longer correlation timescale in the latter case, and I suggest a number of ways in which this proposition could be tested. I have investigated the effect on the landscape of freezing the positions of some particles in a BLJ fluid. This “pinning” procedure induces a dynamical crossover that has been described as an equilibrium “pinning transition”, related to the hypothetical ideal glass transition. I show that the pinning transition is related to (and probably caused by) a dramatic change in the potential energy landscape. Pinning a large fraction of the particles in a supercooled liquid causes its energy landscape to acquire global structure and hence structure-seeking behaviour, very different from the landscape of a typical supercooled liquid. I provide a detailed description of this change in structure, and investigate the mechanism underlying it. I introduce a new algorithm for identifying hierarchical organisation of a landsape, which uses concepts related to the pinning transition but is applicable to unpinned liquids as well. This definition is complementary to metabasins, but the two methods often identify the same higher-order structures. The new “packings” algorithm offers a route to test thermodynamic theories of the glass transition in the context of the potential energy landscape. Over the course of this thesis, I discuss several different terms and methods to identify higher-order structures in the landscapes of model glass formers, and investigate how this organisation varies between different systems. Although little variation is immediately apparent between most glassy landscapes, deeper analysis reveals a surprising diversity, which has important implications for dynamical behaviour in the vicinity of the glass transition.

Nous avons cherché dans cette thèse à caractériser la phase vitreuse formée par des molécules organiques. Pour cela, nous y avons dilué des molécules sur lesquelles on a greffé un fragment d’azobenzène, de façon à pouvoir les orienter sélectivement en les illuminant. On souhaite ainsi s’approcher de la procédure de clouage aléatoire, qui permet en théorie et par simulations de caractériser d’une manière nouvelle la phase vitreuse "idéale", stable thermodynamiquement, qui se formerait pendant la transition vitreuse. On caractérise en temps réel les effets de l’illumination sur ces molécules modifiées (isomérisations cis-trans, orientation) par spectroscopie d’absorption UV polarisée. On mesure l’impact de l’illumination sur la transition vitreuse de leur matrice par spectroscopie diélectrique. Nous avons observé une accélération de la dynamique pendant illumination (diminution du temps de relaxation alpha). Celle-ci n’est pas due à l’orientation de l’azobenzène mais aux autres effets de l’illumination : les isomérisations cycliques cis-trans, et la présence d’isomères cis. Au total, la viscosité du verre est divisée par presque 50 en dessous de Tg, ce qui représente une augmentation de la température effective de l’échantillon de plus de 6K, alors que le chauffage réel dû à l’illumination est inférieur à 100mK. Derrière ces deux effets majoritaires, nous avons repéré que plus l’orientation est grande, plus le temps de relaxation alpha est grand, toute chose égale par ailleurs. Cette influence de l’orientation semble être très forte car nos fractions orientées sont faibles. En suivant les prédictions de la théorie RFOT, on trouve que la transition vitreuse idéale aurait lieu pour une concentration en molécules orientées entre 0,5 et 2% à Tg. Les expériences de random pinning sur des verres moléculaires semblent donc bien réalisables avec l’azobenzène. On jette dans cette thèse les bases d’une nouvelle voie expérimentale qui nous semble prometteuse pour l’étude de la transition vitreuse. / In this thesis we have sought to characterize the glassy phase formed by organic molecules. To do this, we diluted molecules on which we grafted an azobenzene fragment, so that we could selectively orient them by illuminating them. In this way, we wish to approach the random pinning procedure, which makes it possible in theory and by simulations to characterize in a new way the "ideal" thermodynamically stable glass phase that would be formed during the glass transition. The effects of illumination on these modified molecules (cis-trans isomerizations,orientation) are characterized in real time by polarized UV absorption spectroscopy. The impact of illumination on the glass transition of the matrix is measured by dielectric spectroscopy. We observed an acceleration of the dynamics during illumination (decrease of the alpha relaxation time). This is not due to the orientation of azobenzene but to other effects of illumination : cyclic cis-trans isomerizations, and the presence of cis isomers. In total, the viscosity of the glass is divided by almost 50 below Tg, which represents an increase in the effective temperature of the sample of more than 6K, while the actual heating due to illumination is less than 100 mK. Behind these two majority effects, we have identified that the greater the orientation, the greater the alpha relaxation time, all other things being equal. This influence of orientation seems to be very strong because our oriented fractions are small. Following the predictions of the RFOT theory, we find that the ideal glass transition would occur for a concentration of oriented molecules between 0.5 and 2% at Tg. Therefore random pinning experiments on molecular glasses seem to be feasible using azobenzene. In this thesis, we are laying the foundations for a new experimental approach that seems promising to us for the study of glass transition.