A major issue in materials science is why glasses present low-temperature thermal and vibrational properties that sharply differ from those of crystals. In particular, long-wavelength phonons are considerably more damped in glasses, yet it remains unclear how structural disorder at atomic scales affects such a macroscopic phenomenon. A plausible explanation is that phonons are scattered by local elastic heterogeneities that are essentially uncorrelated in space, a scenario known as Rayleigh scattering, which predicts that the damping of acoustic phonons scales with wavenumber k as k (in dimension d). Here we demonstrate that phonon damping scales instead as - k ln k, with this logarithmic enhancement originating from long-range spatial correlations of elastic disorder caused by similar stress correlations. Our work suggests that the presence of long-range spatial correlations of local stress and elasticity may well be the crucial feature that distinguishes amorphous solids from crystals.

Experimental data accumulated over more than 120 years show not only that diffusion coefficients of impurities ordinarily obey the Arrhenius law in crystalline solids, but also that diffusion pre-exponential factors measured in a same solid increase exponentially with activation energies. This so-called compensation effect has been argued to result from a universal positive linear relationship between entropic contributions and energy barriers to diffusion. However, no physical model of entropy has ever been successfully tested against experimental compensation data. Here, we solve this decades-old problem by demonstrating that atomistically computed harmonic vibrational entropic contributions account for most of compensation effects in silicon and aluminum. We then show that, on average, variations of atomic interactions along diffusion reaction paths simultaneously soften low frequency phonons and stiffen high frequency ones; because relative frequency variations are larger in the lower region of the spectrum, softening generally prevails over stiffening and entropy ubiquitously increases with energy.