The strain gap in a system of weakly and strongly interacting two-level systems

Many disordered lattices exhibit remarkable universality in their low-temperature properties, similar to that found in amorphous solids. Recently, a two-TLS (two-level system) model was derived based on the microscopic characteristics of disordered lattices. Within the two-TLS model, the quantitative universality of phonon attenuation, and the energy scale of 1–3K below which universality is observed, are derived as a consequence of the existence of two types of TLSs, differing by their interaction with the phonon field. In this paper, we calculate analytically and numerically the densities of states (DOS) of the weakly and strongly interacting TLSs. We find that the DOS of the former can be well described by a Gaussian function, whereas the DOS of the latter have a power-law correlation gap at low energies, with an intriguing dependence of the power on the short distance cutoff of the interaction. Both behaviors are markedly different from the logarithmic gap exhibited by a single species of interacting TLSs. Our results support the notion that it is the weakly interacting τ -TLSs that dictate the standard low-temperature glassy physics. Yet, the power-law DOS we find for the S-TLSs enables the prediction of a number of deviations from the universal glassy behavior that can be tested experimentally. Our results carry through to the analogous system of electronic and nuclear spins, implying that electronic spin flip rate is significantly reduced at temperatures smaller than the magnitude of the hyperfine interaction.