No Arabic abstract
We study a recently introduced and exactly solvable mean-field model for the density of vibrational states $mathcal{D}(omega)$ of a structurally disordered system. The model is formulated as a collection of disordered anharmonic oscillators, with random stiffness $kappa$ drawn from a distribution $p(kappa)$, subjected to a constant field $h$ and interacting bilinearly with a coupling of strength $J$. We investigate the vibrational properties of its ground state at zero temperature. When $p(kappa)$ is gapped, the emergent $mathcal{D}(omega)$ is also gapped, for small $J$. Upon increasing $J$, the gap vanishes on a critical line in the $(h,J)$ phase diagram, whereupon replica symmetry is broken. At small $h$, the form of this pseudogap is quadratic, $mathcal{D}(omega)simomega^2$, and its modes are delocalized, as expected from previously investigated mean-field spin glass models. However, we determine that for large enough $h$, a quartic pseudogap $mathcal{D}(omega)simomega^4$, populated by localized modes, emerges, the two regimes being separated by a special point on the critical line. We thus uncover that mean-field disordered systems can generically display both a quadratic-delocalized and a quartic-localized spectrum at the glass transition.
We show that the low-frequency regime of the density of states of structural glass formers is crucially sensitive to the stress-ensemble from which the configurations are sampled. Specifically, in two dimensions, an exactly isotropic ensemble with zero shear stress fluctuations, displays a $D(omega_{min}) sim omega^{5}_{min}$ regime, as opposed to the $omega^{4}_{min}$ regime observed under unstrained conditions. We also study an ensemble of strained amorphous solids near a plastic event. We show that the minimum eigenvalue distribution at a strain $gamma$ near the plastic event occurring at $gamma_{P}$, displays a collapse when scaled by $sqrt{gamma_P - gamma}$, and with the number of particles as $N^{-0.22}$. Notably, at low-frequencies, this scaled distribution displays a robust $D(omega_{min}) sim omega^{6}_{min}$ power-law regime, which survives in the large $N$ limit. Finally, we probe the universal properties of this ensemble through a characterization of the second and third eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix near a plastic event.
Glasses possess more low-frequency vibrational modes than predicted by Debye theory. These excess modes are crucial for the understanding the low temperature thermal and mechanical properties of glasses, which differ from those of crystalline solids. Recent simulational studies suggest that the density of the excess modes scales with their frequency $omega$ as $omega^4$ in two and higher dimensions. Here, we present extensive numerical studies of two-dimensional model glass formers over a large range of glass stabilities. We find that the density of the excess modes follows $D_text{exc}(omega)sim omega^2 $ up to around the boson peak, regardless of the glass stability. The stability dependence of the overall scale of $D_text{exc}(omega)$ correlates with the stability dependence of low-frequency sound attenuation. However, we also find that in small systems, where the first sound mode is pushed to higher frequencies, at frequencies below the first sound mode there are excess modes with a system size independent density of states that scales as $omega^3$.
We consider a class of random block matrix models in $d$ dimensions, $d ge 1$, motivated by the study of the vibrational density of states (DOS) of soft spheres near the isostatic point. The contact networks of average degree $Z = z_0 + zeta$ are represented by random $z_0$-regular graphs (only the circle graph in $d=1$ with $z_0=2$) to which Erdos-Renyi graphs having a small average degree $zeta$ are superimposed. In the case $d=1$, for $zeta$ small the shifted Kesten-McKay DOS with parameter $Z$ is a mean-field solution for the DOS. Numerical simulations in the $z_0=2$ model, which is the $k=1$ Newman-Watts small-world model, and in the $z_0=3$ model lead us to conjecture that for $zeta to 0$ the cumulative function of the DOS converges uniformly to that of the shifted Kesten-McKay DOS, in an interval $[0, omega_0]$, with $omega_0 < sqrt{z_0-1} + 1$. For $2 le d le 4$, we introduce a cutoff parameter $K_d le 0.5$ modeling sphere repulsion. The case $K_d=0$ is the random elastic network case, with the DOS close to the Marchenko-Pastur DOS with parameter $t=frac{Z}{d}$. For $K_d$ large the DOS is close for small $omega$ to the shifted Kesten-McKay DOS with parameter $t=frac{Z}{d}$; in the isostatic case the DOS has around $omega=0$ the expected plateau. The boson peak frequency in $d=3$ with $K_3$ large is close to the one found in molecular dynamics simulations for $Z=7$ and $8$.
We study a disordered vibrational model system, where the spring constants k are chosen from a distribution P(k) ~ 1/k above a cut-off value k_min > 0. We can motivate this distribution by the presence of free volume in glassy materials. We show that the model system reproduces several important features of the boson peak in real glasses: (i) a low-frequency excess contribution to the Debye density of states, (ii) the hump of the specific heat c_V(T) including the power-law relation between height and position of the hump, and (iii) the transition to localized modes well above the boson peak frequency.
We show that in the regime when strong disorder is more relevant than field quantization the superfluid--to--Bose-glass criticality of one-dimensional bosons is preceded by the prolonged logarithmically slow classical-field renormalization flow of the superfluid stiffness at mesoscopic scales. With the system compressibility remaining constant, the quantum nature of the system manifests itself only in the renormalization of dilute weak links. On the insulating side, the flow ultimately reaches a value of the Luttinger parameter at which the instanton--anti-instanton pairs start to proliferate, in accordance with the universal quantum scenario. This happens first at astronomic system sizes because of the suppressed instanton fugacity. We illustrate our result by first-principles simulations.