Francesco Lab

Research focus

ERC Consolidator Grant · 2016

Universal explanation of low-temperature glass anomalies

While amorphous solids constitute most of the solid matter found in Nature, their understanding is much poorer than for crystalline solids, at the point that most solid state textbooks are entirely focused on crystals. The reason underlying this uncomfortable situation is that amorphous solids display all kind of anomalies with respect to a simple description in terms of phonon excitations around a perfect lattice. In particular, they display an excess of low-frequency vibrational modes, their thermodynamic and transport coefficients behave differently from crystals, they respond non-linearly to arbitrarily small strains, and have highly cooperative dynamics. Traditionally, each of these…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.