Related papers: Defects, Sound Damping, and the Boson Peak in Amor…
The low-temperature thermal properties of dielectric crystals are governed by acoustic excitations with large wavelengths that are well described by plane waves. This is the Debye model, which rests on the assumption that the medium is an…
Comprehending sound damping is integral to understanding the anomalous low temperature properties of glasses. After decades of theoretical and experimental studies, Rayleigh scattering scaling of the sound attenuation coefficient with…
Comprehending sound damping is integral to understanding the anomalous low temperature properties of glasses. Despite decades of studies, the underlying mechanism of sound damping in glasses is still debated. In this perspective we review…
The low-temperature properties of glasses present important differences with respect to crystalline matter. In particular, models such as the Debye model of solids, which assume the existence of an underlying regular lattice, predict that…
We construct a quantum mechanical model of perfectly isotropic amorphous solids as fuzzy crystals and establish an analytical theory of vibrations for glasses at low temperature. Our theoretical framework relies on the basic principle that…
Glasses are amorphous solids, in the sense that they display elastic behaviour. In crystals, elasticity is associated with phonons, quantized sound-wave excitations. Phonon-like excitations exist also in glasses at very high frequencies…
Phonon spectra in solids often display anomalies that defy the simple Debye law, most prominently the van Hove singularity in crystals and the boson peak in glasses. Although traditionally regarded as distinct, both features are…
The Boson peak is a universal phenomenon in amorphous solids. It can be observed as an anomalous contribution to the low-temperature heat capacity over the Debye model. Amorphous phase-change materials (PCMs) such as Ge-Sb-Te are a family…
It is widely accepted that structural glasses and disordered crystals exhibit anomalies in the their thermal, mechanical and acoustic properties as manifestations of the breakdown of the long-wavelength approximation in a disordered…
In amorphous solids, the vibrational density of states shows an excess of modes over the Debye model, known as the boson peak, whose origin remains unclear. Studies suggest a link to quasi-localized nonphononic vibrations or 'defects,' but…
A hallmark of structural glasses and other disordered solids is the emergence of excess low-frequency vibrations, on top of the Debye spectrum $D_{\rm Debye}(\omega)$ of phonons ($\omega$ denotes the vibrational frequency), which exist in…
Glasses and disordered materials are known to display anomalous features in the density of states, in the specific heat and in thermal transport. Nevertheless, in recent years, the question whether these properties are really anomalous (and…
The vibrational density of states $D(\omega)$ of solids controls their thermal and transport properties. In crystals, the low-frequency modes are extended phonons distributed in frequency according to Debye's law, $D(\omega) \propto…
The emergence of excess vibrational modes over the Debye prediction, typically manifested as the well-known boson peak in the plot of vibrational density of states scaled by the Debye prediction, has become a hallmark of various amorphous…
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…
We study a disordered vibrational model system, where the spring constants k are chosen from a distribution P(k) ~ 1/k above a cut-off value k_min > 0. We can motivate this distribution by the presence of free volume in glassy materials. We…
The vibrational spectra of solids, both ordered and amorphous, in the low-energy regime, control the thermal and transport properties of materials, from heat capacity to heat conduction, electron-phonon couplings, conventional…
The temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity of amorphous solids is markedly different from that of their crystalline counterparts, but exhibits universal behaviour. Sound attenuation is believed to be related to this universal…
Low-temperature properties of crystalline solids can be understood using harmonic perturbations around a perfect lattice, as in Debye's theory. Low-temperature properties of amorphous solids, however, strongly depart from such descriptions,…
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…