Vibrational dynamics of a two-dimensional microgranular crystal

We study the dynamics of an ordered hexagonal monolayer of polystyrene microspheres adhered to a glass substrate coated with a thin aluminum layer. A laser-induced transient grating technique is employed to generate and detect three types of acoustic modes across the entire Brillouin zone in the Γ−K...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wallen, S. P., Boechler, N., Stelling, C., Retsch, M., Alvarado-Gil, J. J., Vega-Flick, Alejandro, Duncan, Ryan Andrew, Nelson, Keith Adam, Maznev, Alexei
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemistry
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111601
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8574-6033
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7804-5418
Description
Summary:We study the dynamics of an ordered hexagonal monolayer of polystyrene microspheres adhered to a glass substrate coated with a thin aluminum layer. A laser-induced transient grating technique is employed to generate and detect three types of acoustic modes across the entire Brillouin zone in the Γ−K direction: low-frequency contact-based modes of the granular monolayer, high-frequency modes originating from spheroidal vibrations of the microspheres, and surface Rayleigh waves. The dispersion relation of contact-based and spheroidal modes indicates that they are collective modes of the microgranular crystal controlled by particle-particle contacts. We observe a spheroidal resonance splitting caused by the symmetry breaking due to the substrate, as well as an avoided crossing between the Rayleigh and spheroidal modes. The measurements are found to be in agreement with our analytical model.