2014 The general aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of amorphous materials, with special reference to glassy and granular systems, indicating areas where the behaviour of these two may be similar. We lay special emphasis on granular systems, as befits their importance as a newly emerging field of study in physics, and present a review of recent progress in understanding thei...

The low-frequency vibrational and low-temperature thermal properties of amorphous solids are markedly different from those of crystalline solids. This situation is counterintuitive because all solid materials are expected to behave as a homogeneous elastic body in the continuum limit, in which vibrational modes are phonons that follow the Debye law. A number of phenomenological explanations for...

Micah Lundberg, Kapilanjan Krishan, Ning Xu, Corey S. O’Hern and Michael Dennin Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-4575 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6396 James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yale University, New H...