Dipole-glass concept and history-dependent phenomena in relaxors

Abstract

The possibility to explain basic physical properties of relaxors within the concept of the dipole-glass transition is discussed. We argue that this concept provides the only consistent picture accounting of all known anomalous features of relaxors. The origin of their history-dependent properties can be naturally traced to the main paradigm of glass-state theory - the existence of numerous metastable states. Based on this paradigm phenomenological description of known history-dependent phenomena in relaxors agrees qualitatively with experiments.