Universal features of the defect-induced damping of lattice vibrations
arXiv:cond-mat/0603343
Abstract
It is shown that any defect gives an Ohmic contribution to the damping of any normal mode of the crystal lattice with nonzero wavevector which does not vanish at zero temperature. This explains the large phason damping observed at low temperatures in incommensurate phases, and might be a key factor to understand the linear-in-$T$ specific heat observed in a number of real dielectrics at low enough temperatures.
3 pages, title changed and paper rewritten for improved presentation of the results