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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 T(g), whether there is an underlying thermodynamic tra...

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Autores principales: Novikov, Vladimir N., Sokolov, Alexei P.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9407199/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36010765
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24081101
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author Novikov, Vladimir N.
Sokolov, Alexei P.
author_facet Novikov, Vladimir N.
Sokolov, Alexei P.
author_sort Novikov, Vladimir N.
collection PubMed
description 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 T(g), whether there is an underlying thermodynamic transition at some finite temperature below T(g), 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.
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spelling pubmed-94071992022-08-26 Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers Novikov, Vladimir N. Sokolov, Alexei P. Entropy (Basel) Review 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 T(g), whether there is an underlying thermodynamic transition at some finite temperature below T(g), 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. MDPI 2022-08-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9407199/ /pubmed/36010765 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24081101 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Novikov, Vladimir N.
Sokolov, Alexei P.
Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title_full Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title_fullStr Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title_full_unstemmed Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title_short Temperature Dependence of Structural Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids and Polymers
title_sort temperature dependence of structural relaxation in glass-forming liquids and polymers
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9407199/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36010765
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24081101
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