Emergent Inter-particle Interactions in Thermal Amorphous Solids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework to determine effective inter-particle force-laws in thermal amorphous solids, capturing emergent many-body interactions and stability properties at finite temperatures.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel method to derive effective force-laws and an effective Hessian for thermal amorphous systems, accounting for many-body interactions beyond microscopic binary forces.

Findings

Effective interactions depend on temperature and particle gaps.

The approach recovers known results for dense hard spheres.

Emergent many-body forces appear in systems with longer-range interactions.

Abstract

Amorphous media at finite temperatures, be them liquids, colloids or glasses, are made of interacting particles that move chaotically due to thermal energy, colliding and scattering continuously off each other. When the average configuration in these systems relaxes only at long times, one can introduce {\em effective interactions} that keep the {\em mean positions} in mechanical equilibrium. We introduce a new framework to determine these effective force-laws that define an effective Hessian that can be employed to discuss stability properties and density of states of the amorphous system. We exemplify the approach with a thermal glass of hard spheres; these feel zero forces when not in contact and infinite forces when they touch. The present approach recaptures the effective interactions which for sufficiently dense spheres at temperature $T$ depends on the gap $h$ between spheres as $T/h$ [C. Brito and M. Wyart, Europhys. Lett. 76 149 (2006)]. In systems at lower densities or with longer microscopic interaction (say like Lennard-Jones), the emergent force laws will include ternary, quaternary and generally higher order many-body terms, even if the microscopic interactions are strictly binary.