Microscopic Aspects of Stretched Exponential Relaxation (SER)

TL;DR

This paper discusses the Scher-Lax-Phillips model explaining stretched exponential relaxation in glasses and supercooled liquids, supported by detailed analysis of three experiments and comparison with other theories.

Contribution

It applies the SLP model to three specific experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in explaining relaxation phenomena in glasses and melts.

Findings

SLP model quantitatively explains relaxation data

Analysis of luminescence in Zn(Se,Te) alloys

Study of fibrous relaxation in OTP and related glasses

Abstract

The Scher-Lax-Phillips (SLP) universal minimalist model quantitatively explains stretching fractions beta(Tg) for a wide variety of relaxation experiments (nearly 50 altogether) on electronic and molecular glasses and deeply supercooled liquids by assuming that quasi-particle excitations indexed by Breit-Wigner channels diffuse to traps (sinks). This model is effective here in discussing in detail three experiments: luminescence in isoelectronic Zn(Se,Te) alloys, fibrous relaxation in orthoterphenyl (OTP) and related glasses and melts up to 1.15Tg, and relaxation of binary chalcogen melts probed by spin-polarized neutrons (T as high as 1.5Tg). The model is also compared to several other recent theories.