Relaxation Time In Disordered Molecular Systems

Relaxation time is the typical time it takes for a closed physical system to attain thermal equilibrium. The equilibrium is brought about by the action of a thermal reservoir inducing changes in the system micro-states. The relaxation time is intuitively expected to increase with system disorder. We derive a simple analytical expression for this dependence in the context of electronic equilibration in an amorphous molecular system model. We find that the disorder dramatically enhances the relaxation time but does not affect its independence of the nature of the initial state. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.