Abstract :
It is assumed that, as a result of quenching, glasses contain static clusters which act as relaxation centers when the glass relaxes after being excited by an external pump. The perturbations relax via diffusion of free energy or entropy to the relaxation centers which act as “black holes” in dissipating the excitations. Because of depletion of excitations near these centers the relaxation process is dispersive and has the Kohlrausch form. The Kohlrausch parameter β is determined by the effective dimensionality d̃ of the configurational relaxation space. The surprising result is that d̃ is determined in most cases by the range of the forces responsible for relaxation.
