Relevance of the Inherent Structures and Related Fundamental Assumptions in the Energy Landscape

We carefully investigate the two fundamental assumptions in the Stillinger-Weber analysis of the inherent structures (IS's) in the energy landscape and come to conclude that they cannot be validated. This explains some of the conflicting results between their conclusions and some recent rigorous and exact results. Our analysis shows that basin free energies, and not IS's, are useful for understanding glasses.