Observation of the Anomalously Slow Relaxation of a Nonergodic System of Interacting Liquid Nanoclusters in a Disordered Confinement of a Random Porous Medium

Abstract

The relaxation of a confined nonwetting liquid dispersed in a disordered nanoporous medium has been experimentally studied in the system consisting of water and the L23 hydrophobized silica gel. It has been found that the relaxation of the system under study is anomalously slow, according to an inverse power law with the exponent α < 0.16. It has been also established that the exponent in this law in the temperature range under investigation has a maximum, which can indicate a transition from the regime of the accelerated decay of a quasi-nonergodic state with an increase in the temperature to the regime of the decay of a nonergodic state with its slowing down because of the breaking of paths for the escape of the liquid through the fractal percolation cluster.