Giancarlo Jug — Università dell'Insubria #
Exotic Magnetic Effects in Glasses From Their Real Atomic Structure #
The study of the structure of glasses (esp. network glasses) has been dominated since the 1930s by the random-network 
model due to Zachariasen, with its variants in case of mixing with good crystal formers. It will be shown that 
Zachariasen's scheme fails to explain low-temperature physics data even for a single-component glass with ppm 
contaminants. The scheme fails even more dramatically when trying to explain magnetic field- and composition-dependent 
effects at low and higher temperatures in multi-component glasses. A new cellular model for the intermediate-range 
atomic structure of glasses will be proposed that leads to a low-energy excitations' description in agreement with 
all available experimental data. The model is applied to predict the paramagnetism of the weak, SQUID-detected 
magnetization M of ordinary window glasses with surprising features in the magnetic-field dependence of M and in the 
(non-Curie) temperature dependence of the susceptibility.