Microscopic observation of two-level systems in a metallic glass model

Abstract

The low-temperature quasi-universal behavior of amorphous solids has been attributed to the existence of spatially-localized tunneling defects found in the low-energy regions of the potential energy landscape. Computational models of glasses can be studied to elucidate the microscopic nature of these defects. Recent simulation work has demonstrated the means of generating stable glassy configurations for models that mimic metallic glasses using the swap Monte Carlo algorithm. Building on these studies, we present an extensive exploration of the glassy metabasins of the potential energy landscape of a variant of the most widely used model of metallic glasses. We carefully identify tunneling defects and reveal their depletion with increased glass stability. The density of tunneling defects near the experimental glass transition temperature appears to be in good agreement with experimental measurements.

17 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Modern computational studies of the glass transition
• Finding defects in glasses through machine learning
• The nature of non-phononic excitations in disordered systems
• Solvable models of two-level systems coupled to itinerant electrons: Robust non-Fermi liquid and quantum critical pairing
• Characterising the slow dynamics of the swap Monte Carlo algorithm
• Two-level systems and harmonic excitations in a mean-field anharmonic quantum glass
• Dynamics of viscous liquids and the Random Barrier Model