Brillouin spectra and vibrational–translational energy exchange in liquid acetonitrile

Abstract

Polarized light scattering experiments in the GHz frequency range (Rayleigh–Brillouin spectra) are reported for liquid acetonitrile. Hypersonic velocities and absorption coefficients have been measured as a function of temperature and of transferred wave vector. The plots of these quantities versus frequency show characteristic dispersion which is indicative of relaxation phenomena. The occurring relaxation has been interpreted as due to a thermal process in which the translational energy of molecules is transferred, during the collisions or through dipolar interactions, into internal degrees of freedom of low quanta vibrational motions. The quite strange behavior of the relaxation time with the temperature has been interpreted and compared with the behavior of the relaxation time in liquid chloroform.