Low-frequency vibrations of soft colloidal glasses

We conduct experiments on two-dimensional packings of colloidal thermosensitive hydrogel particles whose packing fraction can be tuned above the jamming transition by varying the temperature. By measuring displacement correlations between particles, we extract the vibrational properties of a corresponding "shadow" system with the same configuration and interactions, but for which the dynamics of the particles are undamped. The vibrational spectrum and the nature of the modes are very similar to those predicted for zero-temperature idealized sphere models and found in atomic and molecular glasses; there is a boson peak at low frequency that shifts to higher frequency as the system is compressed above the jamming transition.