Mechanisms of light scattering in supercooled liquids

The mechanisms of light scattering in deeply supercooled CS2 have been stud ied using instantaneous normal modes. Changes in the many-body polarizabili ty due to orientational fluctuations are found to be the predominant scatte ring mechanism, while density fluctuations play only a minor role. Although the density and orientational fluctuations are found to be highly coupled, the light-scattering susceptibility does not closely resemble the intrinsi c spectrum of density fluctuations. These results suggest that light-scatte ring data do not provide a reliable probe of density fluctuations in molecu lar liquids.