Slow regions percolate near glass transition

Abstract

A nano-second scale in situ probe reveals that a bulk linear polymer undergoes a sharp phase transition as a function of the degree of conversion, as it nears the glass transition. The scaling behaviour is in the same universality class as percolation. The exponents ��and ��are found to be 1.7 \pm .1 and 0.41\pm 0.01 in agreement with the best percolation results in three dimensions.7 pages, 3 figures