0000000000315653
AUTHOR
K. Okun
Dynamical heterogeneities in glass-forming materials
ABSTRACTCooperative dynamics around the glass transition leads to complex motional behavior of the individual molecules, resulting in non-exponential relaxation. The nature of this non-exponentiality is clarified theoretically as well as experimentally. The non-exponentiality may be due to heterogeneous relaxation (superposition of exponential processes with different rate constants) or homogeneous relaxation (identical intrinsically non-exponential processes). A precise definition of both limits is given. It is shown that the type of relaxation, i.e. to which degree heterogeneous and homogeneous contributions are present, reflects geometrical properties of the dynamics. The heterogeneous c…
Dynamics of Polymer Melts above the Glass Transition: Monte Carlo Studies of the Bond Fluctuation Model
The bond fluctuation model on the simple cubic lattice with a bond-length dependent potential energy favoring long bonds exhibits a glassy freezing in as the temperature is lowered, many properties being qualitatively similar to experiment. The present paper studies the dynamical properties of the model (as they result from the random hopping algorithm), using configurations of undercooled polymer melts that have been carefully equilibrated by the slithering snake algorithm. In this way quantitatively reliable data can be obtained for distinctly lower temperatures than in the previous work on the dynamics of this model that used the random hopping algorithm for equilibration as well. If var…
Computer simulation of models for the structural glass transition
In order to test theoretical concepts on the glass transition, we investigate several models of glassy materials by means of Monte Carlo (MC) and Molecular Dynamics (MD) computer simulations. It is shown that also simplified models exhibit a glass transition which is in qualitative agreement with experiment and that thus such models are useful to study this phenomenon. However, the glass transition temperture as well as the structural properties of the frozen-in glassy phase depend strongly on the cooling history, and the extrapolation to the limit of infinitely slow cooling velocity is nontrivial, which makes the identification of the (possible) underlying equilibrium transition very diffi…