The Importance of Phonons with Negative Phase Quotient in Disordered Solids

Current understanding of phonons is based on the phonon gas model (PGM), which is best rationalized for crystalline materials. However, most of the phonons/modes in disordered materials have a different character and thus may contribute to heat conduction in a fundamentally different way than is described by PGM. For the modes in crystals, which have sinusoidal character, one can separate the modes into two primary categories, namely acoustic and optical modes. However, for the modes in disordered materials, such designations may no longer rigorously apply. Nonetheless, the phase quotient (PQ) is a quantity that can be used to evaluate whether a mode more so shares a distinguishing property of acoustic vibrations manifested as a positive PQ, or a distinguishing property of an optical vibrations manifested as negative PQ. In thinking about this characteristic, there is essentially no intuition regarding the role of positive vs. negative PQ vibrational modes in disordered solids. Given this gap in understanding, herein we studied the respective contributions to thermal conductivity for several disordered solids as a function of PQ. The analysis sheds light on the importance of optical like/negative PQ modes in structurally/compositionally disordered solids, whereas in crystalline materials, the contributions of optical modes are usually small.