Fragility and basic process energies in vitrifying systems

Julio Cesar Martinez-Garcia, Sylwester J. Rzoska, Aleksandra Drozd-Rzoska, Szymon Starzonek, John C. Mauro

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

38 Scopus citations

Abstract

The concept of 'fragility' constitutes a central point of the glass transition science serving as the 'universal' metric linking previtreous dynamics of qualitatively distinct systems. Finding the fundamental meaning of fragility is the 'condicio sine qua' for reaching the long expected conceptual breakthrough in this domain. This report shows that fragility is determined by the ratio between two fundamental process energies, viz. the activation enthalpy and activation energy. The reasoning, avoiding any underlying physical model, is supported by the experimental evidence ranging from low molecular weight liquids and polymers to plastic crystals and liquid crystals. All these lead to the new general scaling plot for dynamics of arbitrary glass former. The limited adequacy of broadly used so far semi-empirical relationships between fragility and the activation energy is shown. Results presented remain valid for an arbitrary complex system and collective phenomena if their dynamics is described by the general super-Arrhenius relation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number8314
Pages (from-to)8314
Number of pages1
JournalScientific reports
Volume5
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2015

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General

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