Boson-peak-like anomaly caused by transverse phonon softening in strain glass.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34599172.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-26029-w and PMC identifier 8486772.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Strain glass is a glassy state with frozen ferroelastic/martensitic nanodomains in shape memory alloys, yet its nature remains unclear. Here, we report a glassy feature in strain glass that was thought to be only present in structural glasses. An abnormal hump is observed in strain glass around 10 K upon normalizing the specific heat by cubed temperature, similar to the boson peak in metallic glass. The simulation studies show that this boson-peak-like anomaly is caused by the phonon softening of the non-transforming matrix surrounding martensitic domains, which occurs in a transverse acoustic branch not associated with the martensitic transformation displacements. Therefore, this anomaly neither is a relic of van Hove singularity nor can be explained by other theories relying on structural disorder, while it verifies a recent theoretical model without any assumptions of disorder. This work might provide fresh insights in understanding the nature of glassy states and associated vibrational properties.