Experimental Tests of a Theoretically Predicted Noncausal Correlation between Dynamics and Thermodynamics in Glass-forming Polymer Melts

The connection between slow activated relaxation in glass-forming liquids and various equilibrium thermodynamic properties remains intensely debated. The microscopic elastically collective nonlinear Langevin equation theory, a force-level approach that causally relates the structure and dynamics, describes the activated relaxation as a mixed local–nonlocal process involving local caging constraints coupled with longer-range collective...