Dynamical heterogeneity

Polymer properties include viscoelasticity and may be synthetic or natural.

Polymer glass transitions have many determinants including relaxation time, viscosity and cage size.

At low temperatures the dynamics become very slow (sluggish) and relaxation time increases from picoseconds to seconds, minutes, or more.

In the microscopic regime, the correlation functions decay exponentially at high temperatures.

At low temperatures the correlation functions have an intermediate regime in which particles have both slow and fast relaxations.