Abstract
Experimental evidence of the dynamics of mesoscopic structure in room-temperature ionic liquids - a feature expected to correlate with many physicochemical properties of these materials - remains limited. Here, we report the observation of slow, sub-α relaxations corresponding to dynamics of nanoscale hydrophobic aggregates in a systematic series of 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium-based ionic liquids from detailed analysis of dynamic-mechanical and broad-band dielectric spectra. The emergence of the sub-α relaxations correlates with increases in the zero-shear viscosity and static dielectric permittivity, constituting direct evidence of the influence of mesoscale aggregation on the physicochemical properties of ionic liquids.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3544-3548 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 15 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 3 2017 |
Funding
Z.V. and J.S. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research Polymers Program through DMR-1508394. T.C. gratefully acknowledges financial support of the U.S. Army Research Office under Contract No. W911NF-17-1-0052.