The form of the low-temperature interactions between defects in neutral glasses is reconsidered. We analyse the case where the defects can be modelled either as simple 2-level tunneling systems, or tunneling rotational impurities. The coupling to strain fields is determined up to 2nd order in the displacement field. It is shown that the linear coupling generates not only the usual $1/r^3$ Ising-like interaction between the rotational tunneling defect modes, which cause them to freeze around a temperature $T_G$, but also a random field term. At lower temperatures the inversion symmetric tunneling modes are still active - however the coupling of these to the frozen rotational modes, now via the 2nd-order coupling to phonons, generates another random field term acting on the inversion symmetric modes (as well as shorter-range $1/r^5$ interactions between them). Detailed expressions for all these couplings are given.
Phonon Echo from Multi-Level Systems and Many-Body Interactions in Low-Temperature Glasses
Key Lab of Advanced Optoelectronic Quantum Architecture and Measurement (MOE), School of Physics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学光电量子架构与测量教育部重点实验室物理学院）；Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校物理系）；Department of Physics, University of Michigan（密歇根大学物理系）；School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院物理学院）
Toyota Central R&D Labs, Inc.（丰田中央研发实验室股份有限公司）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）
Glass transitions are widely observed in various types of soft matter systems. However, the physical mechanism of these transitions remains {elusive}, despite years of ambitious research. In particular, an important unanswered question is whether the glass transition is accompanied by a divergence of the correlation lengths of the characteristic static structures. In this study, we develop a deep-neural-network-based method that is used to extract the characteristic local meso-structures solely from instantaneous {particle} configurations without any {information} about the dynamics. We first …
We propose a conjecture for the limit of mean-field spin glasses with a bipartite structure, and show that the conjectured limit is an upper bound. The conjectured limit is described in terms of the solution of an infinite-dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi equation. A fundamental difficulty of the problem is that the nonlinearity in this equation is not convex. We also question the possibility to characterize this conjectured limit in terms of a saddle-point problem.
Structural glasses feature quasilocalized excitations whose frequencies $ω$ follow a universal density of states ${\cal D}(ω)\!\sim\!ω^4$. Yet, the underlying physics behind this universality is not fully understood. Here we study a mean-field model of quasilocalized excitations in glasses, viewed as groups of particles embedded inside an elastic medium and described collectively as anharmonic oscillators. The oscillators, whose harmonic stiffness is taken from a rather featureless probability distribution (of upper cutoff $κ_0$) in the absence of interactions, interact among themselves throug…
The low temperature acoustic properties of bulk metallic glasses measured over a broad range of frequencies rigorously test the predictions of the standard tunneling model. The strength of these experiments and their analyses is mainly based on the interaction of the tunneling states with conduction electrons or quasiparticles in the superconducting state. A new series of experiments at kHz and GHz frequencies on the same sample material essentially confirms previous measurements and their discrepancies with theoretical predictions. These discrepancies can be lifted by considering more correct…
We compare the ability of various interaction potentials to predict the structural and mechanical properties of silica and sodium silicate glasses. While most structural quantities show a relatively mild dependence on the potential used, the mechanical properties such as the failure stress and strain as well as the elastic moduli depend very strongly on the potential, once finite size effects have been taken into account. We find that to avoid such finite size effects, samples of at least 75,000 atoms are needed. Finally we probe how the simulation ensemble influences the fracture properties o…
Structure and properties of magnesium silicate and borate melts and glasses were investigated by using newly parameterized interaction potentials in molecular dynamics simulations and compared with those of calcium silicate and borate. The competition between the depolymerization of the silica network and the formation of new bonds with modifier ions leads to the enhancement of the elastic moduli with increasing modifier content in alkaline earth silicate glasses. Compared with calcium silicate, the higher elastic moduli of magnesium silicate result from a higher connectivity of the overall gl…
The origin of several emergent mechanical and dynamical properties of structural glasses is often attributed to populations of localized structural instabilities, coined quasilocalized modes (QLMs). Under a restricted set of circumstances, glassy QLMs can be revealed by analyzing computer glasses' vibrational spectra in the harmonic approximation. However, this analysis has limitations due to system-size effects and hybridization processes with low energy phononic excitations (plane waves) that are omnipresent in elastic solids. Here we overcome these limitations by exploring the spectrum of a…
