Tracking the connection between disorder and energy landscape in glasses using geologically hyperaged amber

Abstract

Fossil amber offers the unique opportunity of investigating an amorphous material which has been exploring its energy landscape for more than 110 Myears of natural aging. By applying different x-ray scattering methods to amber before and after annealing the sample to erase its thermal history, we identify a link between the potential energy landscape and the structural and vibrational properties of glasses. We find that hyperaging induces a depletion of the vibrational density of states in the THz region, also ruling the sound dispersion and attenuation properties of the corresponding acoustic waves. Critically, this is accompanied by a densification with structural implications different in nature from that caused by hydrostatic compression. Our results, rationalized within the framework of fluctuating elasticity theory, reveal how upon approaching the bottom of the potential energy landscape (9% decrease in the fictive temperature $T_f$) the elastic matrix becomes increasingly less disordered (6%) and longer-range correlated (22%).

arXiv comment9 pages, 10 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Elastic moduli fluctuations predict wave attenuation rates in glasses
• How to "measure" a structural relaxation time that is too long to be measured?
• Microscopic analysis of sound attenuation in low-temperature amorphous solids reveals quantitative importance of non-affine effects
• Relation between heterogeneous frozen regions in supercooled liquids and non-Debye spectrum in the corresponding glasses
• Long-Range Correlations in Elastic Moduli and Local Stresses at the Unjamming Transition
• Thermal Conductivity of Glass-Forming Liquids