Glass-specific behavior in the damping of acousticlike vibrations.

High frequency sound is observed in lithium diborate glass, Li2O-2B2O3, using Brillouin scattering of light and x rays. The sound attenuation exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the wave vector, with a remarkably rapid increase towards a Ioffe-Regel crossover as the frequency approaches the boson peak from below. An analysis of literature results reveals that the boson-peak frequency is closely related with a Ioffe-Regel limit for sound in many glasses. We conjecture that this relation, specific to glassy materials, might be rather common among them.