Hopping transport in the presence of site-energy disorder: Temperature and concentration scaling of conductivity spectra

Abstract

Recent measurements on ion-conducting glasses have revealed that conductivity spectra for various temperatures T and ionic concentrations n can be superimposed onto a common master curve by an appropriate rescaling of the conductivity and frequency. In order to understand the origin of the observed scaling behavior, we investigate by Monte Carlo simulations the diffusion of particles in a lattice with site energy disorder for a wide range of both T and n values. While the model can account for the changes in ionic activation energies upon changing n, it in general yields conductivity spectra that exhibit no scaling behavior. However, for typical n and sufficiently low T values, a fairly good data collapse is obtained analogous to that found in experiment.