First-principles study of the specific heat of glass at the glass transition with a case study on glycerol

Abstract

Abstract The standard method to determine the transition temperature (T g ) of glasses is the jump in the specific heat, Δ C p . Despite its importance, standard theory for this jump is lacking. The difficulties include lack of proper treatment of the specific heat of liquids, hysteresis, and the timescale issue. The first part of this paper provides a non-empirical method for calculating the specific heat in the glass transition. The method consists of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations based on density-functional theory (DFT) and thermodynamics methods. Calculation of the total energy, which is the heart of DFT, is the most general method for obtaining specific heat for any state of matters. The influence of energy dissipation processes on specific heat is treated by adiabatic MD simulations. The problems of hysteresis and the timescale are alleviated by restricting the scope of calculations to equilibrium states only. The second part of this paper demonstrates the validity and usefulness of the methods by applying to the specific-heat jump of glycerol. By decomposing Δ C p into contributions of the structural, phonon, and thermal expansion energies, an appropriate interpretation for the specific-heat jump has been established: the major contribution to Δ C p is the change in the structural energy. From this, a neat energy diagram about the glass transition is obtained. An outcome of this study is verification of the empirical relationship between the fragility and the specific-heat jump. These two quantities scale to the ratio k = T g / Δ T g , where Δ T g is the width of the transition, through which the two quantities are interrelated.