title: Relaxation time in disordered molecular systems.
abstract: Relaxation time is the typical time it takes for a closed physical system to attain thermal equilibrium. The equilibrium is brought about by the action of a thermal reservoir inducing changes in the system micro-states. The relaxation time is intuitively expected to increase with system disorder. We derive a simple analytical expression for this dependence in the context of electronic equilibration in an amorphous molecular system model. We find that the disorder dramatically enhances the relaxation time but does not affect its independence of the nature of the initial state.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 88040-900 Florianópolis-SC, Brazil.
authors.forename: Rodrigo P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Rocha
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Paraná, 81531-990 Curitiba-PR, Brazil.
authors.forename: José A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Freire