Abstract
The viscoelastic alpha relaxation in glass-forming GeO2 was measured over a range of temperatures near the glass transition using photon correlation spectroscopy. The relaxation in this "strong" glass former exhibits a nonexpo-nential decay identical to that found in a great many simple organic "fragile" liquids. This finding contradicts the longstanding conjecture that nonexponentiality of viscous relaxations near the glass transition are correlated to the liquid's fragility. Instead, the findings offer support for a recent proposal that the nonexponentiality parameter of the alpha-relaxation in supercooled liquids displays a universal value beta(Tg) = 1/2 near the glass transition.