Low-frequency excitations and their localization properties in glasses

Abstract

Besides the dynamical slowing down signaled by an enormous increase of the viscosity approaching the glass transition, structural glasses show interesting anomalous thermodynamic features at low temperatures that hint at peculiar deviations from Debye's law at low enough frequencies. Theory, numerical simulations, and experiments suggest that deviation from Debye's law is due to soft-localized glassy modes that populate the low-frequency spectrum. We study the localization properties of the low-frequency modes in a three-dimensional supercooled liquid model. The density of states D(ω) is computed considering the inherent structures of configurations well thermalized at parental temperatures close to the dynamical transition T_d. We observe a crossover in the probability distribution of the inverse of the participation ratio that happens approaching T_d from high temperatures. We show that a similar crossover is observed at high parental temperature when the translational invariance of the system is explicitly broken by a random pinning field.

Keywords

• glasses
• dynamic properties
• vibrational density of states
• computer simulations