Related papers: Glasslike phonon excitation caused by ferroelectri…
Quantised sound waves -- phonons -- govern the elastic response of crystalline materials, and also play an integral part in determining their thermodynamic properties and electrical response (e.g., by binding electrons into superconducting…
The nature of bosonic excitations in disordered materials has remained elusive due to the difficulties in defining key concepts such as quasi-particles in the presence of disorder. We report on the experimental observation of…
Thermal displacement fluctuations in a crystal may be classified as either "affine" or "non-affine". While the former couples to external stress with familiar consequences, the response of a crystal when {\em non-affine} displacements are…
We present a first principles study of the series of multiferroic barium fluorides with the composition BaMF4, where M is Mn, Fe, Co, or Ni. We discuss trends in the structural, electronic, and magnetic properties, and we show that the…
We formulate a general theory of the dielectric response of a lattice with a structural transition and a polarization instability due to a soft-optic mode coupled to low energy electronic excitations by the electromagnetic fields. the…
Although the rutile structure of TiO$_2$ is stable at high temperatures, the conventional quasiharmonic approximation predicts that several acoustic phonons decrease anomalously to zero frequency with thermal expansion, incorrectly…
We investigate the acoustic normal modes ("phonons") of a 1D microfluidic droplet crystal at the crossover between 2D flow and confined 1D plug flow. The unusual phonon spectra of the crystal, which arise from long-range hydrodynamic…
The anharmonic soft modes studied in recent numerical work in the glass phase of simple liquids have an unstable core, stabilized by the positive restoring forces of the surrounding elastic medium. The present paper formulates an unstable…
Glasses display a wide array of nonlinear acoustic phenomena at temperatures $T\lesssim 1$ K. This behavior has traditionally been explained by an ensemble of weakly-coupled, two-level tunneling states, a theory that is also used to…
The strain field surrounding the center of low frequency vibrational modes is analyzed for numerically created binary glasses with a 1/r^10 repulsive interatomic potential. Outside the unstable inner core of five to twenty atoms, one finds…
Despite the presence of topological disorder, phonons seem to exist also in glasses at very high frequencies (THz) and they remarkably persist into the supercooled liquid. A universal feature of such a systems is the Boson peak, an excess…
The boson peak appears in all amorphous solids and is an excess of vibrational states at low frequencies compared to the phonon spectrum of the corresponding crystal. Until recently, the consensus was that it originated from "defects" in…
We show that a {\em vibrational instability} of the spectrum of weakly interacting quasi-local harmonic modes creates the maximum in the inelastic scattering intensity in glasses, the Boson peak. The instability, limited by anharmonicity,…
Low-frequency vibrations of glassy and crystalline orthoterphenyl are studied by means of neutron scattering. Phonon dispersions are measured along the main axes of a single crystal, and the corresponding longitudinal and transversal sound…
Nematic order is ubiquitous in liquid crystals and is characterized by a rotational symmetry breaking in an otherwise uniform liquid. Recently a similar phenomenon has been observed in some electronic phases of quantum materials related to…
Driving materials using light with more than one frequency component is an emerging technique, enabled by advanced pulse-shaping capabilities in recent years. Here, we translate this technique to lattice vibrations, by exciting multicolor…
Atomic vibrations in perfect, slightly defective or mixed crystals are to a large extent well understood since many decades. Theoretical descriptions are thus in excellent agreement with the experiments. As a consequence, phonon-related…
In this work, we investigate the softening of the in-plane transverse acoustic phonon driven by electronic nematicity in BaFe$_2$(As$_{1-x}$P$_x$)$_2$ using inelastic X-ray scattering, with a focus on the optimally doped sample ($x = 0.31$)…
The electronic structures, lattice dynamics, and magnetic properties of crystal {\beta}-FeSe under hydrostatic pressure have been studied by using the first-principles electronic structure calculations with van der Waals (vdW) corrections.…
We show that the same physical mechanism is fundamental for two seemingly different phenomena such as the formation of two-level systems in glasses and the Boson peak in the reduced density of low-frequency vibrational states g(w)/w^2. This…