FERROELECTRIC AND DIPOLAR GLASS PHASES OF NONCRYSTALLINE SYSTEMS

In a recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 2360 (1995)] we briefly discu ssed the existence and nature of ferroelectric order in positionally d isordered dipolar materials. Here we report further results and give a complete description of our work. Simulations of randomly frozen and dynamically disordered dipolar soft spheres are used to study ferroele ctric ordering in noncrystalline systems. We also give a physical inte rpretation of the simulation results in terms of short- and long-range interactions. Cases where the dipole moment has one, two, and three c omponents (Ising, XY, and XYZ models, respectively) are considered. It is found that the Ising model displays ferroelectric phases in frozen amorphous systems, while the XY and XYZ models form dipolar glass pha ses at low temperatures. In the dynamically disordered model the equat ions of motion are decoupled such that particle translation is complet ely independent of the dipolar forces. These systems spontaneously dev elop long-range ferroelectric order at nonzero temperature: despite th e absence of any fined-tuned short-range spatial correlations favoring dipolar order. Furthermore, since this is a nonequilibrium model, we find that the paraelectric to ferroelectric transition depends on the particle mass. For the XY and XYZ models, the critical temperatures ex trapolate to zero as the mass of the particle becomes infinite, wherea s for the Ising model the critical temperature is almost independent o f mass, and coincides with the ferroelectric transition found for the randomly frozen system at the same density. Thus in the infinite mass limit the results of the frozen amorphous systems are recovered.