High Frequency Dynamics of Glass Forming Liquids at the Glass Transition

In this Letter, we study the high frequency dynamics in the glass transition region, and present measurements of the SsQ, vd in three glass forming systems: glycerol (GLY), o-terphenyl (OTP), and n-butyl-benzene (NBB). In all these systems, we find a propagating longitudinal collective dynamics in a temperature range extending from the glass to the liquid phase well above Tg, and up to Q transfers approaching the inverse of the interparticle separation. This result confirms and generalizes previous findings obtained in a molecular liquid as water [5], and in other glasses as SiO2, glycerol, and LiCl:6H2O [6]. Specifically, it shows that this dynamics is the high frequency continuation of the acoustic branch detected with ultrasound and Brillouin light scattering techniques. Moreover, at a given Q, we find that the temperature dependence of the excitation frequency, VsQ, Td, is more pronounced in the liquid than in the glass, and has a cusplike behavior at a temperature Tx which we infer to be higher than Tg. We associate this behavior to the liquid-glass transition at the investigated frequencies, which manifests in a change of the collective dynamics likely to be due to the freezing of the microscopic diffusional processes. The common behavior among the considered systems may lead us to speculate on a more general origin of this property, and