April 28, 2024

Reviving a Discarded Theory – Researchers Solve Half a Century-Old Physics Mystery

Damped vibrations
If you send out sound waves through the glass and determine them very accurately, you will observe a specific damping of the vibrations that is missing in other solids. It has significant consequences for the thermal properties of glass, such as heat transfer and heat capacities. The effect is popular in physics, however previously there was no theoretical design that might describe it correctly– and supply the structure for more intricate calculations of sound proliferation in glass.
Glasses are disordered solids. Unlike crystalline solids, the particles that comprise glass are sporadically set up. In a lot of solids, the particles sit almost completely “lined up”, like structure obstructs arranged in an accurate lattice. When a wavelike vibration is excited in such crystalline solids at low temperatures, the particles pass the vibration on to their next-door neighbors without damping. The vibration runs in a consistent wave without loss, comparable to a la-ola wave in an arena.
Not so in glass: Its particles are not arranged in a regular lattice but have random positions without stringent order. Oncoming oscillation waves are not brought on in an uniform pattern. Rather, the vibrations arrive at the particles random positions and are continued in a similarly random pattern.
The outcome is that the consistent wave is broken and disperses into a number of smaller waves. This dispersion impact causes the damping. Physicist Lord Rayleigh used this system of light scattering by irregularities in the atmosphere to describe the blue colour of the sky, which is why this impact is called “Rayleigh damping.”
Rediscovery of a disposed of model
About 20 years ago, physicists Marc Mezard, Giorgio Parisi (Nobel Prize in Physics 2021), Anthony Zee and colleagues explained these anomalies in glass by a model of oscillations in random positions called “Euclidean random matrix method” (ERM).
” A basic model that basically was the option”, states Matthias Fuchs, professor of soft condensed matter theory at the University of Konstanz. Nevertheless, the model still had some disparities and was therefore discarded by specialists– and fell under oblivion.
Matthias Fuchs and his associate Florian Vogel took up the old design again. They discovered services to the open concerns the clinical community might not answer at the time and took a look at the revised model by taking a look at its Feynman diagrams. These useful charts were introduced by Richard Feynman in quantum field theory and exposed the consistencies in the patterns of the spread waves.
The outcomes of Matthias Fuchs and Florian Vogel supplied true-to-life computations of the sound propagation and the damping effect in the glass. “Mezard, Parisi, and Zee were correct in their insightful design– harmonic oscillations in a disordered arrangement describe the anomalies of glass at low temperatures,” Fuchs describes.
The re-discovered design, nevertheless, is far from completion of the story: “For us, its the starting point: We have discovered the best model that we can now use for more calculations, particularly of quantum mechanical impacts,” Matthias Fuchs states. “Good vibrations” for research study.
Referral: “Vibrational Phenomena in Glasses at Low Temperatures Captured by Field Theory of Disordered Harmonic Oscillators” by Florian Vogel and Matthias Fuchs, 7 June 2023, Physical Review Letters.DOI: 10.1103/ PhysRevLett.130.236101.
The research study was moneyed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1432 “Fluctuations and Nonlinearities in Classical and Quantum Matter beyond Equilibrium.”.

And how can the proliferation of sound in glass be calculated correctly? If you send sound waves through the glass and measure them extremely properly, you will see a particular damping of the vibrations that is absent in other solids. The result is well known in physics, but till now there was no theoretical model that could describe it correctly– and offer the framework for more complicated estimations of sound propagation in glass.
Glasses are disordered solids. Unlike crystalline solids, the particles that make up glass are not frequently arranged.

For about 50 years, researchers have been perplexed about how glass conducts sound waves and vibrations in a different way than other solids at low temperature levels. 2 physicists have actually now resolved this puzzle by revising an old, discarded model that precisely discusses the peculiar behavior of glass.
How glass moistens sound: University of Konstanz scientists fix a physics mystery– by rediscovering a discarded theory.
In some cases the knowledge is already there– it has actually just been neglected. For approximately fifty years, the special vibratory behavior of glass at low temperature levels has perplexed physicists.
The factor: Glass carries acoustic waves and vibrations differently than other solids– it “vibrates differently.” But why?
And how can the proliferation of sound in glass be determined correctly? Two Konstanz physicists, Matthias Fuchs, and Florian Vogel, have actually now discovered the solution– by taking up an old model, which was created about 20 years earlier and was declined by specialists at the time, and remodeling it. Their brand-new view on the old theory has now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.