Apparent nonergodic behavior of supercooled liquids above the glass transition temperature

Abstract

A speckle pattern can be observed in the polarized component of light scattered from glass forming liquids far above their glass transition temperature. This speckle pattern fluctuates with characteristic time that corresponds to the relaxation time of the additional ultraslow component in the correlation function and is about seven orders of magnitude longer than the relaxation time of the alpha-process. This slow process is out of the experimental time window when the alpha-process is measured by means of the photon correlation spectroscopy and results in an apparent nonergodicity which can be seen as a baseline offset in the ensemble-averaged correlation function. In contrast, the time-averaged field correlation functions which have been measured in practically all light scattering studies always decay to zero. The slow process contributes a q-dependent excess intensity to the polarized component of scattered light. The values of the nonergodicity parameters obtained from the static and dynamic light scattering experiments are equal. Both the slow component and the excess intensity result from denser regions of fractal character which develop in glass-forming liquids on approaching the glass transition.