Experimental evidence of mosaic structure in strongly supercooled molecular liquids
F. Caporaletti (),
S. Capaccioli,
S. Valenti,
M. Mikolasek,
A. I. Chumakov and
G. Monaco ()
Additional contact information
F. Caporaletti: Università di Trento
S. Capaccioli: Università di Pisa
S. Valenti: Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya
M. Mikolasek: ESRF-The European Synchrotron, CS40220
A. I. Chumakov: ESRF-The European Synchrotron, CS40220
G. Monaco: Università di Trento
Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-7
Abstract:
Abstract When a liquid is cooled to produce a glass its dynamics, dominated by the structural relaxation, become very slow, and at the glass-transition temperature Tg its characteristic relaxation time is about 100 s. At slightly elevated temperatures (~1.2 Tg) however, a second process known as the Johari-Goldstein relaxation, βJG, decouples from the structural one and remains much faster than it down to Tg. While it is known that the βJG-process is strongly coupled to the structural relaxation, its dedicated role in the glass-transition remains under debate. Here we use an experimental technique that permits us to investigate the spatial and temporal properties of the βJG relaxation, and give evidence that the molecules participating in it are highly mobile and spatially connected in a system-spanning, percolating cluster. This correlation of structural and dynamical properties provides strong experimental support for a picture, drawn from theoretical studies, of an intermittent mosaic structure in the deeply supercooled liquid phase.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22154-8 Abstract (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-22154-8
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22154-8
Access Statistics for this article
Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie
More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().