Disclination Dipoles as the Basic Structural Elements of Dielectric Glasses

We show that the experimentally observed behavior of thermal conductivity of dielectric glasses over a wide temperature range can be explained by a combination of two scattering processes. The first one comes from the phonon scattering due to biaxial dipoles of wedge disclinations while the second one is the Rayleigh type scattering. The results obtained support the cluster picture suggested earlier for glassy materials.