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Local thermal energy as a structural indicator in glasses.

Jacques Zylberg1, Edan Lerner2, Yohai Bar-Sinai1,3

  • 1Chemical Physics Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.

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Researchers identified "soft spots" in glasses by analyzing local thermal energy. These spots, softer than their surroundings, are prone to rearrangements, offering new insights into glass dynamics.

Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Materials Science
  • Statistical Mechanics

Background:

  • Identifying heterogeneous structures, like localized soft spots, in glasses is a significant challenge.
  • Understanding the relationship between structure and dynamics in glassy systems remains an open problem.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To derive an exact expression for local thermal energy in glassy systems.
  • To investigate the relationship between local thermal energy, structural softness, and internal stresses.
  • To establish a method for identifying and characterizing soft spots in glasses.

Main Methods:

  • Systematic low-temperature expansion to derive an exact expression for local thermal energy.
  • Analysis of the distribution of local thermal energy and its relation to structural properties.
  • Introduction of the concept of a spatial thermal energy field, or "softness field".

Main Results:

  • Local thermal energy can attain anomalously large values, inversely related to structural softness.
  • These large values follow a fat-tailed distribution with a universal exponent.
  • The "softness field" reveals highly localized soft spots susceptible to plastic rearrangements.
  • The identified soft spots show predictive power surpassing traditional normal mode analyses.

Conclusions:

  • The derived expression for local thermal energy provides a physical, observable-based approach to identify structural heterogeneities in glasses.
  • The findings offer a general, system/model-independent method to link glass structure to dynamics.
  • Localized soft spots are key to understanding plastic rearrangements and dynamics in quiescent glasses.