Prof. Angel Alegria

Description

The research is focused on the dynamics of soft-matter, particularly the local motions and the segmental relaxation in polymer materials associated to the glass transition. In the former case the main objective is to identify the molecular origin of the secondary relaxations whereas in the later we have a two fold objective: i) to know to what extent the segmental dynamics of amorphous polymers share the universal properties of the main relaxation process of the small molecule glass-forming systems; ii) to understand how the segmental dynamics of a given polymer is modified when this polymer forms a part of a multi-component system, as in the case of plasticized polymers, polymer blends, hydrated polymers, nanostructured block colpolymers, micellar systems, polymer nanocomposites, ... The dielectric relaxation techniques are the main experimental tools used in this research. However, the basis of the methodology is the combination of dielectric relaxation with other complementary experimental techniques.