No Arabic abstract
The high frequency dynamics of Indomethacin and Celecoxib glasses has been investigated by inelastic x-ray scattering, accessing a momentum-energy region still unexplored in amorphous pharmaceuticals. We find evidence of phonon-like acoustic dynamics, and determine the THz behavior of sound velocity and acoustic attenuation. Connections with ordinary sound propagation are discussed, along with the relation between fast and slow degrees of freedom as represented by non-ergodicity factor and kinetic fragility, respectively.
In amorphous solids, a non-negligible part of thermal conductivity results from phonon scattering on the structural disorder. The conversion of acoustic energy into thermal energy is often measured by the Dynamical Structure Factor (DSF) thanks to inelastic neutron or X-Ray scattering. The DSF is used to quantify the dispersion relation of phonons, together with their damping. However, the connection of the dynamical structure factor with dynamical attenuation of wave packets in glasses is still a matter of debate. We focus here on the analysis of wave packets propagation in numerical models of amorphous silicon. We show that the DHO fits (Damped Harmonic Oscillator model) of the dynamical structure factors give a good estimate of the wave packets mean-free path, only below the Ioffe-Regel limit. Above the Ioffe-Regel limit and below the mobility edge, a pure diffusive regime without a definite mean free path is observed. The high-frequency mobility edge is characteristic of a transition to localized vibrations. Below the Ioffe-Regel criterion, a mixed regime is evidenced at intermediate frequencies, with a coexistence of propagative and diffusive wave fronts. The transition between these different regimes is analyzed in details and reveals a complex dynamics for energy transportation, thus raising the question of the correct modeling of thermal transport in amorphous materials.
High frequency sound is observed in lithium diborate glass, Li$_2$O--2B$_2$O$_3$, using Brillouin scattering of light and x-rays. The sound attenuation exhibits a non-trivial dependence on the wavevector, with a remarkably rapid increase towards a Ioffe-Regel crossover as the frequency approaches the boson peak from below. An analysis of literature results reveals the near coincidence of the boson-peak frequency with a Ioffe-Regel limit for sound in {em all} sufficiently strong glasses. We conjecture that this behavior, specific to glassy materials, must be quite universal among them.
We study the ultra slow domain wall motion in ferromagnetic thin films driven by a weak magnetic field. Using time resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect microscopy, we access to the statistics of the intermittent thermally activated domain wall jumps between deep metastable states. Our observations are consistent with the existence of creep avalanches: roughly independent clusters with broad size and ignition waiting-time distributions, each one composed by a large number of spatio-temporally correlated thermally activated elementary events. Moreover, we evidence that the large scale geometry of domain walls is better described by depinning rather than equilibrium universal exponents.
The vibrational properties of model amorphous materials are studied by combining complete analysis of the vibration modes, dynamical structure factor and energy diffusivity with exact diagonalization of the dynamical matrix and the Kernel Polynomial Method which allows a study of very large system sizes. Different materials are studied that differ only by the bending rigidity of the interactions in a Stillinger-Weber modelization used to describe amorphous silicon. The local bending rigidity can thus be used as a control parameter, to tune the sound velocity together with local bonds directionality. It is shown that for all the systems studied, the upper limit of the Boson peak corresponds to the Ioffe-Regel criterion for transverse waves, as well as to a minimum of the diffusivity. The Boson peak is followed by a diffusivitys increase supported by longitudinal phonons. The Ioffe-Regel criterion for transverse waves corresponds to a common characteristic mean-free path of 5-7 AA{} (which is slightly bigger for longitudinal phonons), while the fine structure of the vibrational density of states is shown to be sensitive to the local bending rigidity.
We have conducted a thorough study of the acoustic properties between 10^-4 and 1 Kelvin for the amorphous metal Zr_x Cu_1-x (x=0.3 and x=0.4), by measuring the relative change of sound velocity dv/v and internal friction Q^-1 as a function of temperature and also of the applied strain, in both superconducting and normal state. We have found that when plotted versus the ratio of strain energy to thermal energy, all measurements display the same behavior: a crossover from a linear regime of ``independent tunneling systems at very low strains and/or high enough temperatures to a nonlinear regime where dv/v and Q^-1 depend on applied strain and the tunneling systems cannot be considered as independent.