Recent advances in fundamental understanding of glass transition

Some examples of recent advances in experiment and theory that have impact on solution of the glass transition problem are briefly discussed. The fundamental importance of a special class of secondary relaxations called the Johari-Goldstein beta-relaxations becomes clear from the recent advances. The main part of the paper addresses a recent research problem, which is the purported anomalous temperature dependence of the relaxation time of another secondary (gamma) relaxation found by fitting dielectric relaxation data in several glass-formers. We show the anomalous T-dependence of this faster gamma-relaxation is caused by the influence exerted by the slower Johari-Goldstein beta-relaxation in the vicinity. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.