In thermal glasses at temperatures sufficiently lower than the glass transition, the constituent particles are trapped in their cages for a sufficiently long time such that their time-averaged positions can be determined before diffusion and structural relaxation takes place. The effective forces are those that hold these average positions in place. In numerical simulations the effective forces ${\mathit{F}}_{ij}$ between any pair of particles can be measured as a time average of the bare forces ${\mathit{f}}_{ij}({\mathit{r}}_{ij}\left(t\right))$. In general, even if the bare forces come from two-body interactions, thermal dynamics dress the effective forces to contain many-body interactions. Here, we develop the effective theory for systems with generic interactions, where the effective forces are derivable from an effective potential and in turn they give rise to an effective Hessian whose eigenvalues are all positive when the system is stable. In this Rapid Communication, we offer analytic expressions for the effective theory, and demonstrate the usefulness and the predictive power of the approach.

• Received 31 July 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.99.011001