Elastic moduli of permanently densified silica glasses

Modelling the mechanical response of silica glass is still challenging, due to the lack of knowledge concerning the elastic properties of intermediate states of densification. An extensive Brillouin Light Scattering study on permanently densified silica glasses after cold compression in diamond anvil cell has been carried out, in order to deduce the elastic properties of such glasses and to provide new insights concerning the densification process. From sound velocity measurements, we derive phenomenological laws linking the elastic moduli of silica glass as a function of its densification ratio. The found elastic moduli are in excellent agreement with the sparse data extracted from literature, and we show that they do not depend on the thermodynamic path taken during densification (room temperature or heating). We also demonstrate that the longitudinal sound velocity exhibits an anomalous behavior, displaying a minimum for a densification ratio of 5%, and highlight the fact that this anomaly has to be distinguished from the compressibility anomaly of a-SiO2 in the elastic domain.