We study the temperature-dependent molecular dynamics, ion conduction, and phase behavior of plastic-crystal electrolytes based on the succinonitrile molecule. We employ calorimetry and dielectric spectroscopy to probe binary mixtures of succinonitrile with glutaronitrile or acetonitrile and also analyze the effect of dissolving lithium salts in these systems. The glutaronitrile-succinonitrile mixture has the highest conductivity, and it is the only plastic-crystal system that displays a perfect correlation between the ion drift and the on-site reorientational dynamics. Doping with lithium ions boosts the conductivity but breaks such perfect correlation. All of these features can be rationalized by assuming that conduction is due to the self-diffusion of a minority of ionized dinitrile molecules. Doping with lithium salts slows down the collective molecular dynamics while leaving the intramolecular relaxation motion unaffected. All samples exhibit a very broad melting transition and exist in a mixed liquid plus plastic state near room temperature. Some mixtures undergo phase segregation below 233 K, the transition temperature between the plastic and the fully ordered solid phase in pure succinonitrile, resulting in the appearance of a space-charge relaxation loss. Phase separation therefore plays an important role in pristine and lithium-doped succinonitrile mixtures.Postprint (published version

We probe the ion conduction and the molecular dynamics in a pure and lithium-salt doped dinitrile molecular plastic crystal. While the diffusion of the Li + ions is decoupled from the molecular reorientational dynamics, in the undoped plastic crystal the temperature dependence of the mobility of dinitrile ions and thus of the conductivity is virtually identical to that of on-site molecular rotations. The undoped material is found to obey the Walden and Stokes-Einstein rules typical of ideal liquid electrolytes, implying that an effective viscosity against diffusion can be defined even for a plastic crystalline phase. These surprising results, never reported before in a translationally ordered solid, indicate that in this dinitrile plastic crystalline material the time scale of translational diffusion is perfectly correlated with that of the purely reorientational on-site dynamics.

We employ dielectric spectroscopy to monitor the relaxation dynamics and crystallization kinetics of the Biclotymol antiseptic in its amorphous phase. The glass transition temperature of the material as determined by dielectric spectroscopy is T g = 290±1 K. The primary (α) relaxation dynamics is observed to follow a Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann temperature dependence, with a kinetic fragility index m = 86±13, which classifies Biclotymol as a relatively fragile glass former. A secondary relaxation is also observed, corresponding to an intramolecular dynamic process of the non-rigid Biclotymol molecule. The crystallization kinetics, measured at four different temperatures above the glass transition temperature, follows an Avrami behavior with exponent virtually equal to n = 2, indicating one-dimensional crystallization into needle-like crystallites, as experimentally observed, with a time-constant nucleation rate. The activation barrier for crystallization is found to be E a = 115±22 kJ mol -1 .

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We employ dielectric spectroscopy and molecular dynamic simulations to investigate the dipolar dynamics in the orientationally disordered solid phase of (1,1,2,2)tetrachloroethane. Three distinct orientational dynamics are observed as separate dielectric loss features, all characterized by a simply activated temperature dependence. The slower process, associated to a glassy transition at 156±1 K, corresponds to a cooperative motion by which each molecule rotates by 180º around the molecular symmetry axis through an intermediate state in which the symmetry axis is oriented roughly orthogonally to the initial and final states. Of the other two dipolar relaxations, the intermediate one is the Johari-Goldstein precursor relaxation of the cooperative dynamics, while the fastest process corresponds to an orientational fluctuation of single molecules into a higher-energy orientation. The Kirkwood correlation factor of the cooperative relaxation is of the order of one tenth, indicating that the molecular dipoles maintain on average a strong antiparallel alignment during their collective motion. These findings show that the combination of dielectric spectroscopy and molecular simulations allows studying in great detail the orientational dynamics in molecular solids. 2 INTRODUCTIONWhile conventional (atomic) solids are made of atomic constituents with only translational degrees of freedom, so that their structure is totally determined by translation symmetry and fundamental excitations are vibrational in character, in molecular solids the constituent molecules possess also orientational (as well as internal) degrees of freedom, which lead to a richer variety of possible solid phases and to the existence of rotational excitations such as librations and orientational relaxations. A molecular solid can display complete translational and rotational order, as in a molecular crystal, or complete rototranslational disorder, as in a molecular glass. In between these two extremes, molecular solids also display phases (known as Orientationally disordered (OD) phases are generally formed by relatively small globular molecules such as derivatives of methane, 1,2,3 neopentane, 4 adamantane 5 or fullerene, 6 or by small linear ones such as ethane derivatives 7,8,9 and dinitriles. 10 OD solids exhibit many of the phenomenological features of glass formers, displaying in particular a cooperative rotational motion, called α relaxation, that undergoes a continuous, dramatic slow-down upon cooling, 11,12 leading in some cases to a glass-like 3 transition associated with rotational freezing. 13,14 Contrary to structural glasses, which do not exhibit any long-range order, OD phases are characterized by a translationally ordered structure and can therefore be more thoroughly characterized with the help of methods that exploit the translational symmetry such as Bragg diffraction, lattice models, or solid-state NMR spectroscopy. Even more importantly, since as mentioned OD phases are generally formed by molecular species with a simple structure ...