Hierarchical structure of the energy landscape in the Voronoi model of dense tissue

Abstract

The Voronoi model is a popular tool for studying confluent living tissues. It exhibits an anomalous glassy behavior even at very low temperatures or weak active self-propulsion, and at zero temperature the model exhibits a disordered solid structure with no evidence of a rigidity transition. Here we investigate the properties of the energy landscape in this limit. We find two disordered solid phases that have similar structural features but that differ in the ultrametricity of their energy landscapes; the crossover between these two states shares phenomenological properties with a Gardner transition. We further highlight how the metric used to calculate distances between configurations influences the ability to detect hierarchical arrangements of basins in the energy landscape.