Low-temperature thermal conductivity and acoustic attenuation in amorphous solids

Abstract

In order to test whether the low-energy excitations explored extensively in amorphous solids are indeed universal, all measurements published on the low-temperature thermal conductivity and acoustic attenuation in these solids have been reviewed, on a total of over 60 different compositions. The ratio of the phonon wavelength \ensuremath{\lambda} to the phonon mean free path l has been found to lie between ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ and ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ in almost all cases, independent of chemical composition and frequency (wavelength) of the elastic waves, which varied by more than nine orders of magnitude in the different experiments. When the data were fitted with the tunneling model, which is based on the assumption of atomic or molecular tunneling states with a certain spectral distribution, the tunneling strength C, which describes their coupling to the lattice, was found to range from ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ to ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ in almost all cases. The only exceptions reported so far are certain films of amorphous silicon, germanium, and carbon. In these films, low-temperature acoustic attenuations over two orders of magnitude smaller have been observed compared to all other amorphous solids. Another remarkable observation is that a large number of disordered crystals, and even a thermally equilibrated quasicrystal, have low-energy lattice vibrations that are quantitatively indistinguishable from those of amorphous solids. Their tunneling strengths also range from ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ to ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}.$ These measurements have also been reviewed. It is concluded that the absence of long-range order is neither sufficient nor necessary for the existence of the low-energy excitations.