Structural relaxation process in glass-forming liquids: A comparison between the optical Kerr effect and dielectric spectroscopy

Optical Kerr effect of liquid and supercooled water: the experimental and data analysis perspective

The time-resolved optical Kerr effect spectroscopy (OKE) is a powerful experimental tool enabling accurate investigations of the dynamic phenomena in molecular liquids. We introduced innovative experimental and fitting procedures, that enable a safe deconvolution of sample response function from the instrumental function. This is a critical issue in order to measure the dynamics of liquid water. We report OKE data on water measuring intermolecular vibrations and the structural relaxation processes in an extended temperature range, inclusive of the supercooled states. The unpreceded data quality makes possible a solid comparison with few theoretical models: the multi-mode Brownian oscillator model, the Kubo's discrete random jump model, and the schematic mode-coupling model. All these models produce reasonable good fits of the OKE data of stable liquid water, i.e., over the freezing point. The features of water dynamics in the OKE data becomes unambiguous only at lower temperatures, i.e., for water in the metastable supercooled phase. We found that the schematic mode-coupling model provides the more rigorous and complete model for water dynamics, even if its intrinsic hydrodynamic approach does not give a direct access to the molecular information.

Reorientational Dynamics of Organophosphate Glass Formers – a Joint Study by 31P NMR, Dielectric Spectroscopy and Light Scattering

We study molecular reorientation in the glass formers triethyl-, tripropyl-, and m-tricresyl phosphate by measuring 31P NMR spectra, relaxation (T 1 and T 2), stimulated echo decays and two-dimensional spectra over a large temperature range (130–370 K). The results are compared to those from dielectric spectroscopy (DS) and depolarized light scattering (LS). While the time constants τ α of the primary (α-) process in the range  × 10−11–100 s well agree, the stretching of the reorientational correlation function is probe dependent, i.e., the rank-two functions (NMR and LS) essentially agree whereas the rank-one function (DS) is less stretched. The very similar 2D spectra recorded as a function of mixing time demonstrate that the reorientational mechanism does not significantly vary among the super-cooled liquids. A model of combining large- and small-angle reorientation allows for reproducing the 2D spectra and may be taken as generic for the dynamics in viscous molecular liquids. Pronounced secondary (β-) processes do not only effect the NMR relaxation but can be identified directly in the time domain by the stimulated echo technique. This becomes possible due to its broad time window (10 μs–100 s). Thus, applying the different 1D and 2D techniques makes 31P NMR well suited to probe molecular reorientation over a wide dynamic range.