Temperature oscillations provide access to high-order physical aging harmonics of a glass forming melt

A high-resolution, temperature oscillation-based probe of physical aging in complex systems is introduced. The Fourier analysis of the measured responses allows one to extract high-order, aging-related nonlinearities that are not accessible via traditional temperature-jump and temperature-ramp procedures. To demonstrate the potential of this oscillatory approach, we analyze the periodic time evolution of glycerol’s structural relaxation using shear rheology as a vehicle. Thereby, we access up to the sixth harmonic and detect aging fingerprints within a resolution range of three orders of magnitude for temperature amplitudes of up to 4 K. The even harmonics are present since aging is not symmetrical with respect to the direction of temperature change. The high-order aging coefficients obtained for glycerol are described reasonably well within the Tool-Narayanaswamy-Moynihan formalism.