Observation of the boson peak at the surface of vitreous silica

The boson peak is an excess in the phonon density of states compared to the Debye model that appears in almost all glasses. It has been repeatedly measured in the bulk by a variety of methods, but its origin is still highly debated. Here we present first experimental evidence of the boson peak on the v-SiO2 surface. The measurements were obtained by helium atom scattering. The boson peak appears as a dispersionless mode of approximately 4 meV in the recorded time-of-flight spectra. It is clearly identified as an excess contribution to the low energy Debye-like region in the surface phonon spectral density which is extracted from the time-of-flight spectra using a straightforward theoretical model.