No Arabic abstract
The thermal and dielectric anomalies of window-type glasses at low temperatures ($T<$ 1 K) are rather successfully explained by the two-level systems (2LS) standard tunneling model (STM). However, the magnetic effects discovered in the multisilicate glasses in recent times, magnetic effects in the organic glasses and also some older data from mixed (SiO$_2$)$_{1-x}$(K$_2$O)$_x$ and (SiO$_2$)$_{1-x}$(Na$_2$O)$_x$ glasses indicate the need for a suitable extension of the 2LS-STM. We show that -- not only for the magnetic effects, but already for the mixed glasses in the absence of a field -- the right extension of the 2LS STM is provided by the (anomalous) multilevel tunnelling systems (A-TS) proposed by one of us for multicomponent amorphous solids. Though a secondary type of TS, different from the standard 2LS, was invoked long ago already, we clarify their physical origin and mathematical description and show that their contribution considerably improves the agreement with the experimental data.
The concentration of paramagnetic trace impurities in glasses can be determined via precise SQUID measurements of the samples magnetization in a magnetic field. However the existence of quasi-ordered structural inhomogeneities in the disordered solid causes correlated tunneling currents that can contribute to the magnetization, surprisingly, also at the higher temperatures. We show that taking into account such tunneling systems gives rise to a good agreement between the concentrations extracted from SQUID magnetization and those extracted from low-temperature heat capacity measurements. Without suitable inclusion of such magnetization contribution from the tunneling currents we find that the concentration of paramagnetic impurities gets considerably over-estimated. This analysis represents a further positive test for the structural inhomogeneity theory of the magnetic effects in the cold glasses.
The dielectric anomalies of window-type glasses at low temperatures ($T<$ 1 K) are rather successfully explained by the two-level systems (2LS) tunneling model (TM). However, the magnetic effects discovered in the multisilicate glasses in recent times cite{ref1}-cite{ref3}, and also some older data from mixed (SiO$_2$)$_{1-x}$(K$_2$O)$_x$ and (SiO$_2$)$_{1-x}$(Na$_2$O)$_x$ glasses cite{ref4}, indicate the need for a suitable generalization of the 2LS TM. We show that, not only for the magnetic effects cite{ref3,ref5} but also for the mixed glasses in the absence of a field, the right extension of the 2LS TM is provided by the (anomalous) multilevel tunneling systems approach proposed by one of us. It appears that new 2LS develop via dilution near the hull of the SiO$_4$-percolating clusters in the mixed glasses.
We present a novel mechanism for the anomalous behaviour of the specific heat in low-temperature amorphous solids. The analytic solution of a mean-field model belonging to the same universality class as high-dimensional glasses, the spherical perceptron, suggests that there exists a crossover temperature above which the specific heat scales linearly with temperature while below it a cubic scaling is displayed. This relies on two crucial features of the phase diagram: (i) The marginal stability of the free-energy landscape, which induces a gapless phase responsible for the emergence of a power-law scaling (ii) The vicinity of the classical jamming critical point, as the crossover temperature gets lowered when approaching it. This scenario arises from a direct study of the thermodynamics of the system in the quantum regime, where we show that, contrary to crystals, the Debye approximation does not hold.
Low temperature properties of glasses are derived within a generalized tunneling model, considering the motion of charged particles on a closed path in a double-well potential. The presence of a magnetic induction field B violates the time reversal invariance due to the Aharonov-Bohm phase, and leads to flux periodic energy levels. At low temperature, this effect is shown to be strongly enhanced by dipole-dipole and elastic interactions between tunneling systems and becomes measurable. Thus, the recently observed strong sensitivity of the electric permittivity to weak magnetic fields can be explained. In addition, superimposed oscillations as a function of the magnetic field are predicted.
We study link-diluted $pm J$ Ising spin glass models on the hierarchical lattice and on a three-dimensional lattice close to the percolation threshold. We show that previously computed zero temperature fixed points are unstable with respect to temperature perturbations and do not belong to any critical line in the dilution-temperature plane. We discuss implications of the presence of such spurious unstable fixed points on the use of optimization algorithms, and we show how entropic effects should be taken into account to obtain the right physical behavior and critical points.