Fig. 1

Exploring the energy landscape via the incremental stress marching approach. a A schematic representation of the energy landscape for a complex system. The orange ball represents the initial state of the system. Applying an external stress and local enthalpy minimization can help overcome the energy barrier, which ultimately takes the system to the minimum of the metabasin. We note that this method would not take the system to an adjacent metabasin that contains the global minimum. b Schematic representation of incremental cyclic scheme proposed in this study. The approach contains loading, unloading and reloading sequences, which are demonstrated from left to right. The stress is incrementally perturbed around a mean shear stress level, τ