Phonon interpretation of the ‘boson peak’ in supercooled liquids

T. S. Grigera, V. Martín-Mayor (), G. Parisi and P. Verrocchio
Additional contact information
T. S. Grigera: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
V. Martín-Mayor: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
G. Parisi: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
P. Verrocchio: Università di Trento

Nature, 2003, vol. 422, issue 6929, 289-292

Abstract: Abstract Glasses1,2 are amorphous solids, in the sense that they display elastic behaviour. In crystalline solids, elasticity is associated with phonons, which are quantized vibrational excitations. Phonon-like excitations also exist in glasses at very high (terahertz; 1012 Hz) frequencies; surprisingly, these persist in the supercooled liquids3. A universal feature of such amorphous systems is the boson peak: the vibrational density of states has an excess compared to the Debye squared-frequency law. Here we investigate the origin of this feature by studying the spectra of inherent structures4 (local minima of the potential energy) in a realistic glass model. We claim that the peak is the signature of a phase transition in the space of the stationary points of the energy, from a minima-dominated phase (with phonons) at low energy to a saddle-point-dominated phase5,6,7 (without phonons). The boson peak moves to lower frequencies on approaching the phonon–saddle transition, and its height diverges at the critical point. Our numerical results agree with the predictions of euclidean random matrix theory8 on the existence of a sharp phase transition9 between an amorphous elastic phase and a phonon-free one.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01475 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:422:y:2003:i:6929:d:10.1038_nature01475

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature01475

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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