Anomalous phonon scattering and elastic correlations in amorphous solids

作者:Gelin Simon; Tanaka Hajime; Lemaitre Anael
来源:Nature Materials, 2016, 15(11): 1177-+.
DOI:10.1038/NMAT4736

摘要

A major issue in materials science is why glasses present low-temperature thermal and vibrational properties that sharply differ from those of crystals. In particular, long-wavelength phonons are considerably more damped in glasses, yet it remains unclear how structural disorder at atomic scales affects such a macroscopic phenomenon. A plausible explanation is that phonons are scattered by local elastic heterogeneities that are essentially uncorrelated in space, a scenario known as Rayleigh scattering, which predicts that the damping of acoustic phonons scales with wavenumber k as k(d+1) (in dimension d). Here we demonstrate that phonon damping scales instead as -k(d+1) ln k, with this logarithmic enhancement originating from long-range spatial correlations of elastic disorder caused by similar stress correlations. Our work suggests that the presence of long-range spatial correlations of local stress and elasticity may well be the crucial feature that distinguishes amorphous solids from crystals.

  • 出版日期2016-11