Silvio Franz 1 Thibaud Maimbourg 2, 1 Giorgio Parisi 3 Antonello Scardicchio 4
Silvio Franz, Thibaud Maimbourg, Giorgio Parisi, Antonello Scardicchio. Impact of jamming criticality on low-temperature anomalies in structural glasses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , National Academy of Sciences, 2019, 116 (28), pp.13768-13773. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1820360116⟩. ⟨hal-02292219⟩
We present a novel mechanism for the anomalous behaviour of the specific heat in low-temperature amorphous solids. The analytic solution of a mean-field model belonging to the same universality class as high-dimensional glasses, the spherical perceptron, suggests that there exists a crossover temperature above which the specific heat scales linearly with temperature while below it a cubic scaling is displayed. This relies on two crucial features of the phase diagram: (i) The marginal stability of the free-energy landscape, which induces a gapless phase responsible for the emergence of a power-law scaling (ii) The vicinity of the classical jamming critical point, as the crossover temperature gets lowered when approaching it. This scenario arises from a direct study of the thermodynamics of the system in the quantum regime, where we show that, contrary to crystals, the Debye approximation does not hold.
- 1. LPTMS – Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques
- 2. LPTENS – Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l’ENS
- 3. Center for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity, INFM Roma ‘La Sapienza’ and Dipartimento di Fisica
- 4. ICTP – Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics [Trieste]