Thermal conductivity and specific heat of glasses.

Abstract

It is well known that in a wide variety of amorphous materials an empirical correlation exists between the plateau in the thermal conductivity κ and the bump in C/T3 where C is the specific heat [1,2]. Both occur at roughly the same temperature for a given material and this temperature lies between 3K and 10K. Recent theoretical efforts to explain the thermal conductivity have included fractons [3] and phonon localization [4,5]. It is not obvious, however, in the first case how one can map a glass onto a self-similar percolating network, or in the second case how one can explain the rise in κ above the plateau.