Abstract
A study of the viscoelastic relaxation in anhydrous liquid P2O5 is reported. Properties of the time decay of the dynamic structure factor, including the average structural relaxation time and the stretching exponent, were obtained for temperatures from 850 °C to near the glass transition Tg=419 °C using photon correlation spectroscopy. Analysis indicates that P2O5 is a strong glass-forming liquid but one that exhibits an abnormally nonexponential relaxation near Tg. The viscoelastic behavior of P2O5 is compared with that of its alkali-metalmodified metaphosphate counterparts NaPO3 and LiPO3, as well as with the mechanical relaxation of chalcogenide glasses, to demonstrate common patterns in dynamical behavior presumably arising from changes in the average connectivity of the glass structure.