Phonon damping

The paramagnons change the physical properties of the system in much the same way as damped phonons do. The scale on which these changes occur is determined by a characteristic temperature, the spin-fluctuation temperature , given by... 

For insulating surfaces, the friction p can be only due to phonon emission into the substrate, but on metal surfaces damping to vibration may result from both phononic and electronic excitations so that p= %/+ pp. The damping coefficient is assumed to be in the form of a diagonal matrix. 

Theoretical analysis indicates that the phononic damping depends strongly on resonance frequency of molecule vibrations. The experimental values of yi )ph in Table 2 are found much larger than the contributions from electronic damping, which is mainly due to the higher resonance frequency of perpendicular vibrations of hydrocarbons on Cu(lOO). 

TABLE 2—Phononic damping deduced from He-atom scattering measurement [20]. ... 

According to the quantum transition state theory [108], and ignoring damping, at a temperature T h(S) /Inks — a/ i )To/2n, the wall motion will typically be classically activated. This temperature lies within the plateau in thermal conductivity [19]. This estimate will be lowered if damping, which becomes considerable also at these temperatures, is included in the treatment. Indeed, as shown later in this section, interaction with phonons results in the usual phenomena of frequency shift and level broadening in an internal resonance. Also, activated motion necessarily implies that the system is multilevel. While a complete characterization of all the states does not seem realistic at present, we can extract at least the spectrum of their important subset, namely, those that correspond to the vibrational excitations of the mosaic, whose spectraFspatial density will turn out to be sufficiently high to account for the existence of the boson peak. 

Under moderate (pJ/cm2) photoexcitation, where the photoexcited carrier density is comparable or less than the intrinsic density, time evolution of coherent A g and Eg phonons is respectively described by a damped harmonic oscillation... 

Fig. 2.8. Left oscillatory part of the reflectivity change of Bi (0001) surface at 8K (open circles). Fit to the double damped harmonic function (solid curve) shows that the Aig and Eg components (broken and dotted curves) are a sine and a cosine functions of time, respectively. Right pump polarization dependence of the amplitudes of coherent Aig and Eg phonons of Bi (0001). Adapted from [25]...

Figure 5. Model spectra of a naked neutron star. The emitted spectrum with electron-phonon damping accounted for and Tsurf = 106 K. Left panel uniform surface temperature right panel meridional temperature variation. The dashed line is the blackbody at Tsurf and the dash-dotted line the blackbody which best-fits the calculated spectrum in the 0.1-2 keV range. The two models shown in each panel are computed for a dipole field Bp = 5 x 1013 G (upper solid curve) and Bp = 3 x 1013 G (lower solid curve). The spectra are at the star surface and no red-shift correction has been applied. From Turolla, Zane and Drake (2004).

Despite the difficulty cited, the study of the vibrational spectrum of a liquid is useful to the extent that it is possible to separate intramolecular and inter-molecular modes of motion. It is now well established that the presence of disorder in a system can lead to localization of vibrational modes 28-34>, and that this localization is more pronounced the higher the vibrational frequency. It is also well established that there are low frequency coherent (phonon-like) excitations in a disordered material 35,36) These excitations are, however, heavily damped by virtue of the structural irregularities and the coupling between single molecule diffusive motion and collective motion of groups of atoms. 

There exists an extensive literature on theoretical calculations of the vibrational damping of an excited molecule on a metal surface. The two fundamental excitations that can be made in the metal are creation of phonons and electron-hole pairs. The damping of a high frequency mode via the creation of phonons is a process with small probability, because from pure energy conservation, it requires about 6-8 phonons to be created almost simultaneously. 

In chemisorbed systems, the molecular orbitals of the adsorbate are mixed with the electronic states of the substrate, producing strong adsorption bonds, i.e. the frequency of the adsorbate mode is well above the highest phonon frequency of the substrate. The relaxation of these vibrational excited states via emission of substrate phonons has only a low probability, because many phonons have to be enoitted during the decay. Non-radiative damping by electron-hole pair excitation appears to be the dominant relaxation path in these systems. 

With the availability of lasers, Brillouin scattering can now be used more confidently to study electron-phonon interactions and to probe the energy, damping and relative weight of the various hydro-dynamic collective modes in anharmonic insulating crystals.The connection between the intensity and spectral distribution of scattered light and the nuclear displacement-displacement correlation function has been extensively discussed by Griffin 236). 

Brillouin scattering of laser light in liquids has been studied by several authors. Shapiro etal. 233) measured hypersonic velocities in various liquids and obtained a Brillouin linewidth of 0.011 cm" in methylene chloride but of less than 0.002 cm in benzene, carbon disulfide and chloroform. The broadening of the Brillouin components arises from damping of thermal phonons and is closely connected with the viscosity coefficient of the medium. From the measured linewidths, the lifetimes of the phonons responsible for Brillouin scattering at 89 45 were calculated to be 4.8 x 10 sec for methylene chloride and 7.6 x 10 sec for toluene. 

An elementary treatment of the free-electron motion (see, e.g., Kittel, 1962, pp. 107-109) shows that the damping constant is related to the average time t between collisions by y = 1 /t. Collision times may be determined by impurities and imperfections at low temperatures but at ordinary temperatures are usually dominated by interaction of the electrons with lattice vibrations electron-phonon scattering. For most metals at room temperature y is much less than oip. Plasma frequencies of metals are in the visible and ultraviolet hu>p ranges from about 3 to 20 eV. Therefore, a good approximation to the Drude dielectric functions at visible and ultraviolet frequencies is... 

Dislocations move when they are exposed to a stress field. At stresses lower than the critical shear stress, the conservative motion is quasi-viscous and is based on thermal activation that overcomes the obstacles which tend to pin the individual dislocations. At very high stresses, > t7crit, the dislocation velocity is limited by the (transverse) sound velocity. Damping processes are collisions with lattice phonons. 

Here, z0 10-10 -10 13s is the inverse attempt frequency that depends on the damping of the magnetic moments by the phonons. The superparamagnetic blocking occurs when r equals the measuring time of each experimental point, te, therefore TB = all / kB ln(/(, / r0 ), where a is a constant that depends on the width of the particle size distribution. 

In multilayered lattices, even in such ones, for which the macroscopic characteristics are not distinguished by an appreciable anisotropy (as, for example, HTSC type 1-2-3), the interaction between separate atoms or atomic groups can be strongly anisotropic. The "damping" interaction propagation between layers inherent in substances of the specified class may result in appreciable manifestation of such local anisotropy both in the phonon spectrum [15] and in the behaviour of some vibrationary characteristics, in particular the root-mean-square displacement of atoms from separate layers along various crystal directions. 

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