Delocalized collective motions

Boson Peak, a Signature of Delocalized Collective Motions in Glasses (Example FC as Sensor Molecule)... 

The so-called Boson peak is visible as a hump in the reduced DOS, g(E)IE (Fig. 9.39b), and is a measure of structural disorder, i.e., any deviation from the symmetry of the perfectly ordered crystal will lead to an excess vibrational contribution with respect to Debye behavior. The reduced DOS appears to be temperature-independent at low temperatures, becomes less pronounced with increasing temperature, and disappears at the glass-liquid transition. Thus, the significant part of modes constituting the Boson peak is clearly nonlocalized on FC. Instead, they represent the delocalized collective motions of the glasses with a correlation length of more than 20 A. 

Beyond the Boson peak, the reduced DOS reveals for all studied glasses a temperature-independent precisely exponential behavior, g(E)/E exp( / o) with the decay energies Eo correlating with the energies E of the Boson peak. This finding additionally supports the view that the low-energy dynamics of the glasses are indeed delocalized collective motions because local and quasilocal vibrations would be described in terms of a power law or a log-normal behavior [102]. 

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