Power laws in pressure-induced structural change of glasses

HJ Zhang and KY Qiao and YL Han, NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 11, 2005 (2020).

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15583-4

Many glasses exhibit fractional power law (FPL) between the mean atomic volume v(a) and the first diffraction peak position q(1), i.e. vaq1-d with d similar or equal to 2.5 deviating from the space dimension D=3, under compression or composition change. What structural change causes such FPL and whether the FPL and d are universal remain controversial. Here our simulations show that the FPL holds in both two- and three- dimensional glasses under compression when the particle interaction has two length scales which can induce nonuniform local deformations. The exponent d is not universal, but varies linearly with the deformable part of soft particles. In particular, we reveal an unexpected crossover regime with d>D from crystal behavior (d=D) to glass behavior (d

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