THE INTERPRETATION OF THERMALLY STIMULATED CURRENTS OBTAINED BY THE THERMAL SLICING TECHNIQUE

The measurement of thermally stimulated depolarization currents (TSDCs ), especially in the modification known as the thermal slicing (TS) or fractional polarization (FP) technique, is a useful experimental tech nique for examining the dielectric properties of a variety of systems, including glasses and polymers. It is generally assumed that the TS t echnique detects, for each polarizing temperature T-p, only a narrow r ange of states, and that analysis of the TSDC reveals the activation e nergy and pre-exponential factor of their relaxation time. This interp retation is shown to be very dubious in many cases, and especially for glasses near the glass transition temperature when the stales in the system are expected to change with time and temperature. This paper ad dresses the question of what information about a system can reliably b e deduced from TS experiments.