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Universal link between the boson peak and transverse phonons in glass

Nature Materials volume 7, pages 870–877 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

The physical properties of a topologically disordered amorphous material (glass), such as heat capacity and thermal conductivity, are markedly different from those of its ordered crystalline counterpart. The understanding of these phenomena is a notoriously complex problem. One of the universal features of disordered glasses is the ‘boson peak’, which is observed in neutron and Raman scattering experiments. The boson peak is typically ascribed to an excess density of vibrational states. Here, we study the nature of the boson peak, using numerical simulations of several glass-forming systems. We discovered evidence suggestive of the equality of the boson peak frequency to the Ioffe–Regel limit for ‘transverse’ phonons, above which transverse phonons no longer propagate. Our results indicate a possibility that the origin of the boson peak is transverse vibrational modes associated with defective soft structures in the disordered state. Furthermore, we suggest a possible link between slow structural relaxation and fast boson peak dynamics in glass-forming systems.

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Figure 1: Structural relaxation and high-frequency dynamics (boson peak).
Figure 2: Longitudinal and transverse phonon dynamics and the dispersion relations.
Figure 3: Relation between the boson peak frequency and the Ioffe–Regel limit frequencies for longitudinal and transverse phonons.
Figure 4: Scaled shape of the boson peak.
Figure 5: Structural origin of the boson peak.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to T. Kawasaki for his help in the Voronoi analysis and thank D. A. Head for a critical reading of the manuscript. This work was partially supported by a grand-in-aid from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.

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  1. Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan

    Hiroshi Shintani & Hajime Tanaka

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  1. Hiroshi Shintani
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  2. Hajime Tanaka
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Contributions

H.T. conceived the project, H.S. carried out numerical simulations and H.S. and H.T. made the analysis and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Hajime Tanaka.

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Shintani, H., Tanaka, H. Universal link between the boson peak and transverse phonons in glass. Nature Mater 7, 870–877 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2293

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