Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers

Understanding the microscopic mechanism of the transition of glass remains one of the most challenging topics in Condensed Matter Physics. What controls the sharp slowing down of molecular motion upon approaching the glass transition temperature , whether there is an underlying thermodynamic transit...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2022-08, Vol.24 (8), p.1101
Main Authors: Novikov, Vladimir N, Sokolov, Alexei P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Chain dynamics
Condensed matter physics
Energy
Failure analysis
Fragility
Glass
Glass formation
glass transition
Glass transition temperature
Heterogeneity
High temperature
Liquids
Molecular motion
Phase transitions
Physics
Polymer industry
Polymers
Questions
relaxation
Review
Slopes
supercooled liquids
Temperature dependence
Thermodynamics
Time
Viscosity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Understanding the microscopic mechanism of the transition of glass remains one of the most challenging topics in Condensed Matter Physics. What controls the sharp slowing down of molecular motion upon approaching the glass transition temperature , whether there is an underlying thermodynamic transition at some finite temperature below , what the role of cooperativity and heterogeneity are, and many other questions continue to be topics of active discussions. This review focuses on the mechanisms that control the steepness of the temperature dependence of structural relaxation (fragility) in glass-forming liquids. We present a brief overview of the basic theoretical models and their experimental tests, analyzing their predictions for fragility and emphasizing the successes and failures of the models. Special attention is focused on the connection of fast dynamics on picosecond time scales to the behavior of structural relaxation on much longer time scales. A separate section discusses the specific case of polymeric glass-forming liquids, which usually have extremely high fragility. We emphasize the apparent difference between the glass transitions in polymers and small molecules. We also discuss the possible role of quantum effects in the glass transition of light molecules and highlight the recent discovery of the unusually low fragility of water. At the end, we formulate the major challenges and questions remaining in this field.
ISSN:1099-4300
1099-4300
DOI:10.3390/e24081101