Related papers: Further testing the validity of generalized hetero…
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…
A theory of vibrational excitations based on power-law spatial correlations in the elastic constants (or equivalently in the internal stress) is derived, in order to determine the vibrational density of states $D(\omega)$ of disordered…
We study energy minimized configurations of amorphous solids with a simple shear degree of freedom. We show that the low-frequency regime of the vibrational density of states of structural glass formers is crucially sensitive to the…
Besides the dynamical slowing down signaled by an enormous increase of the viscosity approaching the glass transition, structural glasses show interesting anomalous thermodynamic features at low temperatures that hint at peculiar deviations…
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…
Some aspects of how sound waves travel through disordered solids are still unclear. Recent work has characterized a feature of disordered solids which seems to influence vibrational excitations at the mesoscales, local elastic…
Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
We study theoretically and numerically the elastic properties of hard sphere glasses, and provide a real-space description of their mechanical stability. In contrast to repulsive particles at zero-temperature, we argue that the presence of…
The theoretical understanding of the low-frequency modes in amorphous solids at finite temperature is still incomplete. The study of the relevant modes is obscured by the dressing of inter-particle forces by collision-induced momentum…
The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all…
Interpreting the vibrational properties of amorphous solids beyond Debye's theory is challenging due to the presence of inhomogeneity on the mesoscopic scale. In this work, we model this inhomogeneity by real-space fluctuating elasticity…
Amorphous solids exhibit an excess of low-frequency vibrational modes beyond the Debye prediction, contributing to their anomalous mechanical and thermal properties. Although a $\omega^4$ power-law scaling is often proposed for the…
We study the relation between short-time vibrational modes and long-time relaxational dynamics in a kinetically constrained lattice gas with harmonic interactions between neighbouring particles. We find a correlation between the location of…
In the recent years, much attention has been devoted to the inhomogeneous nature of the mechanical response at the nano-scale in disordered solids. Clearly, the elastic heterogeneities that have been characterized in this context are…
A theory for the vibrational dynamics in disordered solids [W. Schirmacher, Europhys. Lett. {\bf 73}, 892 (2006)], based on the random spatial variation of the shear modulus, has been applied to determine the wavevector ($k$) dependence of…
Structural glasses formed by quenching a melt possess a population of soft quasilocalized excitations --- often called `soft spots' --- that are believed to play a key role in various thermodynamic, transport and mechanical phenomena. Under…
Glassy solids exhibit a wide variety of generic thermomechanical properties, ranging from universal anomalous specific heat at cryogenic temperatures to nonlinear plastic yielding and failure under external driving forces, which…
In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet,…
Glasses have a large excess of low-frequency vibrational modes in comparison with most crystalline solids. We show that such a feature is a necessary consequence of the weak connectivity of the solid, and that the frequency of modes in…