Dynamic Model of Super-Arrhenius Relaxation Rates in Glassy Materials

Super-Arrhenius relaxation rates in glassy materials can be associated with thermally activated rearrangements of increasing numbers of molecules at decreasing temperatures. We explore a model of such a mechanism in which stringlike fluctuations in the neighborhood of shear transformation zones provide routes along which rearrangements can propagate, and the entropy associated with critically long strings allows the rearrangement to be distributed stably in the surrounding material. We further postulate that, at low enough temperatures, these fluctuations are localized on the interfaces between frustration-limited domains, and in this way obtain a modified Vogel-Fulcher formula for the relaxation rate.