Unified study of viscoelasticity and sound damping in hard and soft amorphous solids

Recent research has made significant progress in understanding the non-phonon vibrational states present in amorphous materials. It has been established that their vibrational density of states follows non-Debye scaling laws. Here, we show that the non-Debye scaling laws play a crucial role in determining material properties of a broad range of amorphous solids, from “hard" amorphous solids like structural glasses to “soft" amorphous solids such as foams and emulsions. We propose a unified framework of viscoelasticity and sound damping for these materials. Although these properties differ significantly between hard and soft amorphous solids, they are determined by the non-Debye scaling laws. We also validate our framework using numerical simulations.