Breakdown of the Debye approximation for the acoustic modes with nanometric wavelengths in glasses

On the macroscopic scale, the wavelengths of sound waves in glasses are large enough that the details of the disordered microscopic structure are usually irrelevant, and the medium can be considered as a continuum. On decreasing the wavelength this approximation must of course fail at one point. We show here that this takes place unexpectedly on the mesoscopic scale characteristic of the medium range order of glasses, where it still works well for the corresponding crystalline phases. Specifically, we find that the acoustic excitations with nanometric wavelengths show the clear signature of being strongly scattered, indicating the existence of a cross-over between well-defined acoustic modes for larger wavelengths and ill-defined ones for smaller wavelengths. This cross-over region is accompanied by a softening of the sound velocity that quantitatively accounts for the excess observed in the vibrational density of states of glasses over the Debye level at energies of a few milli-electronvolts. These findings thus highlight the acoustic contribution to the well-known universal low-temperature anomalies found in the specific heat of glasses.