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- Glass transition (2)
- Alpha relaxation (1)
- Boson peak (1)
- Confinement (1)
- Cooperativity length (1)
- Dielectric properties (1)
- Electric modulus (1)
- Neutron diffraction/scattering (1)
- Relaxation (1)
The effect of a nanometer confinement on the molecular dynamics of poly(methyl phenyl siloxane) (PMPS) was studied by dielectric spectroscopy (DS), temperature modulated DSC (TMDSC) and neutron scattering (NS). Nanoporous glasses with pore sizes of 2.520 nm have been used. DS and TMDSC experiments show that for PMPS in 7.5 nm pores the molecular dynamics is faster than in the bulk which originates from an inherent length scale of the underlying molecular motions. For high temperatures the temperature dependence of the relaxation rates for confined PMPS crosses that of the bulk state. Besides finite states effects also the thermodynamic state of nano-confined PMPS is different from that of the bulk. At a pore size of 5 nm the temperature dependence of the relaxation times changes from a Vogel/Fulcher/Tammann like to an Arrhenius behavior where the activation energy depends on pore size. This is in agreement with the results obtained by NS. The increment of the specific heat capacity at the glass transition depends strongly on pore size and vanishes at a finite length scale between 3 and 5 nm which can be regarded as minimal length scale for glass transition to appear in PMPS.
In this article we present inelastic neutron scattering (INS) experiments on different systems of confined glass-formers. The aim of these experiments is to study the influence of spatial restriction on the microscopic dynamics related to the glass transition. Such results could be helpful for the detection of a currently speculated cooperativity length of the glass transition. The glass-forming component is either a molecular liquid or a polymer. The confining matrices are `hard' (silica glass, silicon) or `soft' (microemulsion droplets). For some experiments the confining structure could be spatially oriented. Except for the soft confinement the naïvely expected acceleration effect could only be found at low temperatures where INS experiments are difficult because of the long relaxation times. A clear effect of confinement could be observed for the glass-typical low energy vibrations (boson peak). This effect seems to be completely different for soft and hard confinement. Surprisingly, the experiments on oriented nanopores did not show any signs of an anisotropy of the dynamics.