Acoustic dynamics of network-forming glasses at mesoscopic wavelengths

C. Ferrante, E. Pontecorvo, G. Cerullo, A. Chiasera, G. Ruocco, W. Schirmacher and T. Scopigno ()
Additional contact information
C. Ferrante: Universitá di Roma ‘La Sapienza’
E. Pontecorvo: Universitá di Roma ‘La Sapienza’
G. Cerullo: IFN-CNR, Politecnico di Milano, P.zza L. da Vinci 32
A. Chiasera: CNR-IFN CSMFO Lab., Via alla Cascata 56/C
G. Ruocco: Universitá di Roma ‘La Sapienza’
W. Schirmacher: Universitá di Roma ‘La Sapienza’
T. Scopigno: Universitá di Roma ‘La Sapienza’

Nature Communications, 2013, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract The lack of long-range structural order in amorphous solids induces well known thermodynamic anomalies, which are the manifestation of distinct peculiarities in the vibrational spectrum. Although the impact of such anomalies vanishes in the long wavelength, elastic continuum limit, it dominates at length scales comparable to interatomic distances, implying an intermediate transition regime still poorly understood. Here we report a study of such mesoscopic domains by means of a broadband version of picosecond photo-acoustics, developed to coherently generate and detect hypersonic sound waves in the sub-THz region with unprecedented sampling efficiency. We identify a temperature-dependent fractal v3/2 frequency behaviour of the sound attenuation, pointing to the presence of marginally stable regions and a transition between the two above mentioned limits. The essential features of this behaviour are captured by a theoretical approach based on random spatial variation of the shear modulus, including anharmonic interactions.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2826 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:4:y:2013:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms2826

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2826

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().