Ulta-Low Temperature Properties of Amorphous and Glassy Materials

During the grant period we made detailed studies of the dynamics of two level tunneling systems in glasses at very low temperature and by the application of AC and DC electric fields. Models have been developed that now account for both the formation and subsequent breaking of resonant tunneling pairs, and strongly bound pairs in a swept electric field. Perhaps most importantly, we saw a critical field in the polymeric glass Mylar, beyond which recovery following the application of a strong electric field is substantially modified from the predictions of current models. It was essential during the final grant period to see how general these new properties were by testing for them in a new and broader set of glasses. At the same time, the discovery that tunneling systems with nuclei possessing electric quadrupole moments that couple the TS behavior to magnetic fields was studied in this laboratory, using some of the probes that we alone employ. Finally, we were developing our own dielectric pulsed echo system, operating for the first time at the low energy splittings and hence temperatures at which interactions between TS are important. We combined this technique with the sudden application of both electric and strain fields to better understand the dynamics of the response of TS in glasses on a much shorter time scale than is possible with our established probes