Universalities in the primary response of condensed matter

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1504, USA

Received: 29 September 1995
Accepted: 18 January 1996

Abstract

In 1863 it was first recognized that materials may exhibit two distinct types of primary response. Although the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts (KWW) and Curie-von Schweidler (CvS) laws are still in use, observed relaxation is now known to deviate from such simple formulas. In 1990, Dixon et al. discovered a scaling procedure demonstrating that even the deviations from the KWW law are remarkably universal. Here, we introduce a modified Dixon-Nagel scaling for CvS-like behavior, then use a model of mesoscopic domains with internal degrees of freedom to provide a common physical basis for both "universalities".