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While electrons in disordered systems have been studied early on leading to the Nobel prize in physics 1977 for Anderson, Mott, and van Vleck, a similar understanding of phonons and lattice dynamics of disordered and amorphous systems, or systems with strong anharmonicity, is still at its infancy. This field is currently blossoming due to its centrality in contemporary condensed matter physics and materials physics. In particular, to arrive at a deeper understanding of complex materials (e.g. polymers, metallic glasses, high-T/high-P superconductors) it is essential to develop a successful description of vibrational modes, soft modes, anharmonicity and elasticity/mechanical instabilities in these complex condensed matter systems [1-5]. I will briefly review our new understanding of phonons and elasticity in real complex solids, including polymers, from the angle of my recent contributions to the field. In the second part, I will show how this understanding can lead to a theoretical framework which describes and rationalizes superconductivity in disordered systems such as metallic glasses [6] as well as high-T superconductors at high pressures, which have currently achieved record high Tc at room temperature [7-8], and where anharmonicity plays a crucial role.
References
[1] A. Zaccone and E. Scossa-Romano, Phys. Rev. B 83, 184205 (2011)
[2] M. Baggioli and A. Zaccone, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 145501 (2019)
[3] M. Baggioli and A. Zaccone, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 013267 (2020)
[4] A. Zaccone and K. Trachenko, PNAS 117, 19653 (2020)
[5] A. Zaccone and M. Baggioli, PNAS 118 (5), e2022303118 (2021)
[6] M. Baggioli, C. Setty and A. Zaccone, Phys. Rev. B 101, 214502 (2020)
[7] C. Setty, M. Baggioli and A. Zaccone, Phys. Rev. B 102, 174506 (2020)
[8] C. Setty, M. Baggioli and A. Zaccone, Phys. Rev. B 103, 094519 (2021).
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=A8gZPRgAAAAJ&hl=en
Alessio Zaccone is a professor of condensed matter theory in the Physics Department, University of Milan, Italy. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2010 and has been on the faculty at Technical University Munich, and at University of Cambridge, before taking up his current position in 2018. His research interests include statistical physics of disordered systems, theories of amorphous solids (metallic glasses, polymeric and molecular glasses), colloidal systems, as well as granular materials, phonons and superconductivity. Prof. Zaccone has published 122 articles in peer-reviewed journals so far, including 12 papers in Physical Review Letters, 5 in PNAS, 2 in Science Advances, 1 in Nature Communications, etc.
He has received international awards, including the Gauss Professor Award for 2020 from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, Germany and the Emerging Leader nomination by the Journal of Physics of the Institute of Physics, UK. He is known for having found an exact mathematical solution to the elasticity problem of jammed sphere packings by accounting for the nonaffine particle displacements induced by disorder (Zaccone & Scossa-Romano, PRB 2011).