Specific-Heat Spectroscopy of the Glass Transition

Abstract

The glass transition has historically been viewed as an anomaly involving the specific heat of supercooled liquids. It is also associated with a divergence of the relaxation times for liquid rearrangements. We have developed a new spectroscopy to study the frequency dependence of the specific heat of liquids which connects these two approaches. We report measurements as a function of temperature of the distribution of relaxation times which are directly responsible for the glass transition in glycerol.