Specific heat at low temperatures in quasiplanar molecular crystals: Where do glassy anomalies in minimally disordered crystals come from?

We present low-temperature specific heat (Cp) measurements of a monoclinic P2_{1}/c crystal formed by quasiplanar molecules of tetrachloro-m-xylene. The dynamic disorder frozen at low-temperature of the asymmetric unit (formed by a half molecule) consists of reorientation around a three-fold-like ax...

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Veröffentlicht in:arXiv.org 2024-12
Hauptverfasser: Szewczyk, Daria, Moratalla, Manuel, Chajewski, Grzegorz, Gebbia, Jonathan F, Jeżowski, Andrzej, Krivchikov, Alexander I, Barrio, María, Tamarit, Josep Ll, Ramos, Miguel A
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:We present low-temperature specific heat (Cp) measurements of a monoclinic P2_{1}/c crystal formed by quasiplanar molecules of tetrachloro-m-xylene. The dynamic disorder frozen at low-temperature of the asymmetric unit (formed by a half molecule) consists of reorientation around a three-fold-like axis perpendicular to the benzene ring. Such a minimal disorder gives rise to typical glassy anomalies, as a linear in contribution in Cp ascribed to two-level systems and a broad maximum around 6.6 K in Cp/T^3 (the boson peak). We discuss these results in the framework of other quasiplanar molecular crystals with different accountable number of in-plane molecular orientations We find that the density of two-level systems does not correlate with the degree of orientational disorder. Rather, it is the molecular asymmetry that seems to play a relevant role in the thermal anomalies. Furthermore, we discuss the suggested correlation between the boson peak and Debye temperatures. We find that a linear correlation between the boson peak and Debye temperatures holds for many -- but not all -- structural glasses and strikingly holds even better for some disordered crystals, including our studied quasiplanar molecular crystals.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2412.03335