Second-order-derivative analysis of structural relaxation time in the elastic model of glass-forming liquids

Recently it was shown [V. N. Novikov and A. P. Sokolov, Phys. Rev. E 92, 062304 (2015)10.1103/PhysRevE.92.062304] that the second derivative with respect to inverse temperature of the structural relaxation time in some supercooled molecular liquids has a sharp maximum. It marks the point at which the apparent activation energy begins to saturate with decreasing temperature. The elastic model of glass-forming liquids expresses the temperature dependence of the structural relaxation time through that of the shear modulus. In this paper, we test whether this model is able to predict the maximum of the second derivative. We confirm its presence in the elastic model by analyzing the temperature dependence of the Brillouin light scattering in salol. This is a very subtle feature of the temperature dependence, which is greatly enhanced when taking derivatives. Its presence in the Brillouin data provides strong support to the elastic model of glass-forming liquids.