Corresponding States of Structural Glass Formers

The variation with respect to temperature T of transport properties of 58 fragile structural glass forming liquids (68 data sets in total) are analyzed and shown to exhibit a remarkable degree of universality. In particular, super-Arrhenius behaviors of all super-cooled liquids appear to collapse to one parabola for which there is no singular behavior at any finite temperature. This behavior is bounded by an onset temperature To above which liquid transport has a much weaker temperature dependence. A similar collapse is also demonstrated, over the smaller available range, for existing numerical simulation data.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Updated References, Table Values, Submitted for Publicatio

Dynamics of imidazolium ionic liquids from a combined dielectric relaxation and optical kerr effect study: evidence for mesoscopic aggregation

We have measured the intermolecular dynamics of the 1,3-dialkylimidazolium-based room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) [emim][BF4], [emim][DCA], and [bmim][DCA] at 25 degrees C from below 1 GHz to 10 THz by ultrafast optical Kerr effect (OKE) spectroscopy and dielectric relaxation spectroscopy (DRS) augmented by time-domain terahertz and far-infrared FTIR spectroscopy. This concerted approach allows a more detailed analysis to be made of the relatively featureless terahertz region, where the higher frequency diffusional modes are strongly overlapped with librations and intermolecular vibrations. Of greatest interest though, is an intense low frequency (sub-alpha) relaxation that we show is in accordance with recent simulations that have reported mesoscopic structure arising from aggregates or clusters-structure that explains the anomalous and inconveniently high viscosities of these liquids