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Glasses

When disorder helps

Nature Materials volume 7, pages 842–843 (2008)Cite this article

Amorphous solids show intriguing universal behaviour whose origins often remain poorly understood. One of these features, the boson peak, is now shown to be directly linked to transverse vibrations.

Among the thermal anomalies of glasses, the most striking are the temperature dependences of specific heat and thermal conductivity. The thermal conductivity of non-crystalline solids is markedly different from that of a crystal. In the low-temperature region it is several orders of magnitude smaller and shows a different power-law temperature dependence. Furthermore, the thermal conductivity has a plateau in the 1–10 K temperature region2,3,4. Remarkably, the thermal conductivity is not materials-dependent and almost all glasses show the same behaviour, not just qualitatively but quantitatively. This poses the intriguing question: why do all glasses have the same thermal conductivity curve at low temperatures? The plot thickens further when we consider another thermal property of glasses, the specific heat.

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Figure 1: Typical structure of a glassy state as modelled by Shintani and Tanaka1.

HIROSHI SHINTANI / HAJIME TANAKA

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Affiliations

  1. Giancarlo Ruocco is in the Physics Department at the 'Sapienza', University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy, and in the INFM-CNR Research Centre on Soft Matter, 00185 Rome, Italy. giancarlo.ruocco@roma1.infn.it

    Giancarlo Ruocco

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  1. Giancarlo Ruocco
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Ruocco, G. When disorder helps. Nature Mater 7, 842–843 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2311

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2311

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