Excess vibrational modes of a crystal in an external non-affine field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how enhancing non-affine vibrational fluctuations in a 2D crystal affects its stability, phonon modes, and potential implications for phase transitions, supported by analytical calculations and molecular dynamics simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a simple 2D crystal model to analytically study the effects of a conjugate field on non-affine displacements, revealing destabilization and phonon softening.

Findings

Enhancing non-affine fluctuations destabilizes the crystal.

Phonon density of states shifts towards zero frequency.

Growing length and time scales indicate critical behavior.

Abstract

Thermal displacement fluctuations in a crystal may be classified as either "affine" or "non-affine". While the former couples to external stress with familiar consequences, the response of a crystal when {\em non-affine} displacements are enhanced using the thermodynamically conjugate field, is relatively less studied. We examine this using a simple model of a crystal in two dimensions for which analytical calculations are possible. Enhancing non-affine fluctuations destabilises the crystal. The population of small frequency phonon modes increases, with the phonon density of states shifting, as a whole, towards zero frequency. Even though the crystal is free of disorder, we observe growing length and time scales. Our results, which may have implications for the glass transition and structural phase transitions in solids, are compared to molecular dynamics simulations. Possibility of experimental verification of these results is also discussed.