We apply the model introduced in Phys. Rev. B 75, 064202 (2007), cond-mat/0610469, to calculate the anisotropy effect in the interaction of two level systems with phonons in disordered crystals. We particularize our calculations to cubic crystals and compare them with the available experimental data to extract the parameters of the model. With these parameters we calculate the interaction of the dynamical defects in the disordered crystal with phonons (or sound waves) propagating along other crystalographic directions, providing in this way a method to investigate if the anisotropy comes from the two-level systems being preferably oriented in a certain direction or solely from the lattice anisotropy with the two-level systems being isotropically oriented.
The low temperature acoustic and thermal properties of amorphous, glassy materials are remarkably similar. All these properties are described theoretically with reasonable quantitative accuracy by assuming that the amorphous solid contains dynamical defects that can be described at low temperatures as an ensemble of two-level systems (TLS), but the deep nature of these TLSs is not clarified yet. Moreover, glassy properties were found also in disordered crystals, quasicrystals, and even perfect crystals with a large number of atoms in the unit cell. In crystals, the glassy properties are not un…
We study Anderson localization of a scalar wave in an ensemble of resonant point scatterers embedded in an anisotropic background medium. For uniaxial anisotropy of moderate strength, the mobility edges and the critical exponent of the localization transition are found to be unaffected by the anisotropy provided that the determinant of the anisotropy tensor is kept equal to one upon introducing the anisotropy. Localized modes have anisotropic spatial shapes although their anisotropy is weaker than the one expected from purely geometric considerations. The modes with the longest lifetimes are f…
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 expected to strongly impact the nature of the sound waves which, in contrast to the case of perfect crystals, cannot be completely rationalized in terms of phonons. Building on previous work on a toy model showing an amorphisation transition [Mizuno H, Mossa S, Barrat JL (2013) EPL {\bf 104}:56001], we investigate the relationship between sound waves and elastic h…
Anisotropic disordered system are studied in this work within the random barrier model. In such systems the transition probabilities in different directions have different probability density functions. The frequency-dependent conductivity at low temperatures is obtained using an effective medium approximation. It is shown that the isotropic universal ac-conduction law, $σ\ln σ=u$, is recovered if properly scaled conductivity ($σ$) and frequency ($u$) variables are used.
An approximate solution of the Dyson equation related to a stochastic Helmholtz equation, which describes the acoustic dynamics of a three-dimensional isotropic random medium with elastic tensor fluctuating in space, is obtained in the framework of the Random Media Theory. The wavevector-dependence of the self-energy is preserved, thus allowing a description of the acoustic dynamics at wavelengths comparable with the size of heterogeneity domains. This in turn permits to quantitatively describe the mixing of longitudinal and transverse dynamics induced by the medium's elastic heterogeneity and…
Using a cutoff-free formulation of the coherent transport theory, we show that the interference terms at the origin of localization strongly affect the transport anisotropy. In contrast to the common hypothesis, we then find that the anisotropies of incoherent and coherent diffusion are significantly different, in particular at criticality. There, we show that the coherent transport anisotropy is mainly determined by the properties of the disorder-averaged effective scattering medium while the incoherent transport contributions become irrelevant.
we investigate the thermodynamic properties of weakly anisotropic disordered magnetic chains where the nearest-neighbor Heisenberg exchange coupling is the dominant spin-spin interaction. In addition to the exchange interaction, there is single-ion anisotropy with the direction of the easy axis being the same for all spins. The analysis is carried out in the limit S >> 1, where S denotes the ionic spin, and in the temperature range T << JaveS, where Jave is the average magnitude of the exchange interaction. It is assumed that the independent boson picture is appropriate so that the thermodynam…
The phonon scattering processes on the three solid phases of ethanol are investigated by means of thermal conductivity, light and neutron scattering measurements as well as molecular dynamics simulations on single-crystalline models for the two crystalline modifications (fully ordered monooclinic and orientationally disordered bcc phases). The orientationally disordered crystal is found to exhibit a temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity that is remarkably close to that found for the structurally amorphous solid, specially at low temperatures. The results, together with measurement…
We study the horizontal expansion of vertically confined ultra-cold atoms in the presence of disorder. Vertical confinement allows us to realize a situation with a few coupled harmonic oscillator quantum states. The disordered potential is created by an optical speckle at an angle of 30° with respect to the horizontal plane, resulting in an effective anisotropy of the correlation lengths of a factor of 2 in that plane. We observe diffusion leading to non-Gaussian density profiles. Diffusion coefficients, extracted from the experimental results, show anisotropy and strong energy dependence, in …
Extended systems driven through strong disorder are modeled generically using coarse-grained degrees of freedom that interact elastically in the directions parallel to the driving force and that slip along at least one of the directions transverse to the motion. A realization of such a model is a collection of elastic channels with transverse viscous couplings. In the infinite range limit this model has a tricritical point separating a region where the depinning is continuous, in the universality class of elastic depinning, from a region where depinning is hysteretic. Many of the collective tr…
We study Anderson localization of waves in a one dimensional disordered meta-material of bilayers comprising of thin fixed length scatterers placed randomly along a homogenous medium. As an interplay between order and disorder, we identify a new regime of strong disorder where the localization length becomes independent of the amount of disorder but depends on the frequency of the wave excitation and on the properties of the fixed length scatterer. As an example of a naturally occurring nearly one dimensional disordered bilayer, we calculate the wavelength dependent reflection spectrum for Koi…
Amorphous solids, as well as many disordered lattices, display remarkable universality in their low temperature acoustic properties. This universality is attributed to the attenuation of phonons by tunneling two-level systems (TLSs), facilitated by the interaction of the TLSs with the phonon field. TLS-phonon interaction also mediates effective TLS-TLS interactions, which dictates the existence of a glassy phase and its low energy properties. Here we consider KBr:CN, the archetypal disordered lattice showing universality. We calculate numerically, using conjugate gradients method, the effectiv…
Theoretical Prediction of the Effective Dynamic Dielectric Constant of Disordered Hyperuniform Anisotropic Composites Beyond the Long-Wavelength Regime
The all-orders beta function is used to study disordered Dirac fermions in 2D. The generic strong coupling fixed `points' of anisotropic current-current interactions at large distances are actually isotropic manifolds corresponding to subalgebras of the maximal current algebra at short distances. The IR theories are argued to be current algebra cosets. We illustrate this with the simple example of anisotropic su(2), which is the physics of Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions. We work out the phase diagram for the Chalker-Coddington network model which is in the universality class of the integer Qu…
We study transport properties of anisotropic Heisenberg model in a disordered magnetic field experiencing dephasing due to external degrees of freedom. In the absence of dephasing the model can display, depending on parameter values, the whole range of possible transport regimes: ideal ballistic conduction, diffusive, or ideal insulating behavior. We show that the presence of dephasing induces normal diffusive transport in a wide range of parameters. We also analyze the dependence of spin conductivity on the dephasing strength. In addition, by analyzing the decay of spin-spin correlation funct…
In scattering experiments, the dynamical structure factor (DSF) characterizes inter-particle correlations and their time evolution. We analytically evaluated the DSF of disordered solids with disorder in the spring constant, by averaging over quenched disorder in the values of lattice bond strength, along the acoustic branch. The width of the resulting acoustic excitation peak is treated as the effective damping constant $Γ(q)$, which we found to grow linearly with exchanged momentum $q$. This is verified by numerically calculating a model system consisting of harmonic linear chains with disor…
We propose an explanation for the quadratic dependence on the momentum $Q$, of the broadening of the acoustic excitation peak recently found in the study of the dynamic structure factor of many real and simulated glasses. We ascribe the observed $Q^2$ law to the spatial fluctuations of the local wavelength of the collective vibrational modes, in turn produced by the dishomegeneity of the inter-particle elastic constants. This explanation is analitically shown to hold for 1-dimensional disordered chains and satisfatorily numerically tested in both 1 and 3 dimensions.
The mechanism of acoustic wave propagation in supercooled liquids is not yet fully understood since the vibrational dynamics of supercooled liquids are strongly affected by their amorphous inherent structures. In this paper, the acoustic wave propagation in a supercooled model liquid is studied by using normal mode analysis. Due to the highly disordered inherent structure, a single acoustic wave is decomposed into many normal modes in broad frequency range. This causes the rapid decay of the acoustic wave and results in anomalous wavenumber dependency of the dispersion relation and the rate of…
The macroscopic transport properties in a disordered potential, namely diffusion and weak/strong localization, closely depend on the microscopic and statistical properties of the disorder itself. This dependence is rich of counter-intuitive consequences. It can be particularly exploited in matter wave experiments, where the disordered potential can be tailored and controlled, and anisotropies are naturally present. In this work, we apply a perturbative microscopic transport theory and the self-consistent theory of Anderson localization to study the transport properties of ultracold atoms in an…
We consider the localization properties of a lattice of coupled masses and springs with random mass and spring constant values. We establish the full phase diagrams of the system for pure mass and pure spring disorder. The phase diagrams exhibit regions of stable as well as unstable wave modes. The latter are of interest for the instantaneous-normal-mode spectra of liquids and the nascent field of acoustic metamaterials. We show the existence of delocalization-localization transitions throughout the phase diagram and establish, by high-precision numerical studies, that the universality of thes…
Recently, Nattermann and Pokrovsky [PRL 100, 060402 (2008)] have proposed a scaling approach for studying Bose-Einstein condensates in strongly disordered traps. In this paper we implement their scaling argument in the framework of the variational method for solving the time dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We consider atomic gases with both short range s-wave interaction and long range anisotropic dipolar interaction. The theory is addressed to the regime of strong disorder and weak interactions where the physics is dominated by the collective pinning due to the disorder. The phenomenon o…
We discuss the strain dependence of the acoustic properties of amorphous metals in both normal and superconducting states, in the temperature range 0.1 mK $ \le T \le 1 $K. A crossover is found when the strain energy is of the order of the effective interaction energy between tunneling systems at the corresponding temperature. Our results provide clear evidence for the interaction between tunneling systems, whose energy is in quantitative agreement with theoretical expectations, and reveal that without the knowledge of the corresponding strain dependences, the measured temperature dependences …
Using exact diagonalization techniques we study the dynamical response of the anisotropic disordered Heisenberg model for systems of S=1/2 spins with infinite range random exchange interactions at temperature T=0. The model can be considered as a generalization, to the quantum case, of the well known Sherrington-Kirkpatrick classical spin-glass model. We also compute and study the behavior of the Edwards Anderson order parameter and energy per spin as the anisotropy evolves from the Ising to the Heisenberg limits.
Classical versus quantum Anderson localization in disordered systems
Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；Dipartimento di Fisica, Universitá di Roma ”La Sapienza”（罗马智慧大学物理系）；Institut für Physik, Universität Mainz（美因茨大学物理研究所）
We study critical behaviour of disordered magnets near four dimensions. We consider the system with explicit cubic anisotropy and scalar disorder and that with random direction of anisotropy axis. The quenched disorder is taken into account by replica method. Using the method of operator product expansion, we derive in the first order to $ε$ approximation the renormalization group equations taking into account possible replica symmetry breaking.
