Low-temperature anomalies in structural glasses: impact of jamming criticality

Silvio Franz, Thibaud Maimbourg, Giorgio Parisi, Antonello Scardicchio

Published 2018-11-28Version 1

We present a novel mechanism for the anomalous behaviour of the specific heat in low-temperature amorphous solids. The analytic solution of a mean-field model belonging to the same universality class as high-dimensional glasses, the spherical perceptron, suggests that there exists a crossover temperature above which the specific heat scales linearly with temperature while below it a cubic scaling is displayed. This relies on two crucial features of the phase diagram: (i) The marginal stability of the free-energy landscape, which induces a gapless phase responsible for the emergence of a power-law scaling (ii) The vicinity of the classical jamming critical point, as the crossover temperature gets lowered when approaching it. This scenario arises from a direct study of the thermodynamics of the system in the quantum regime, where we show that, contrary to crystals, the Debye approximation does not hold.