Eur. Phys. J. B 36, 21-26 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2003-00313-2

The factorized form for dielectric relaxation

Departamento de Física, Universidade do Minho 4710-057 Braga, Portugal

Corresponding author: ^a jlr@fisica.uminho.pt

Received: 11 June 2003
Revised: 28 September 2003
Published online: 19 November 2003

Abstract

The factorized form of the dielectric function, introduced by Berreman and Unterwald to describe reststrahlen, is well know by infrared spectroscopists. In the present paper, we show that such form can be generalized to account for relaxational dispersion. After reviewing the fundamentals of this approach, we show that the factorized form proposed for the description of dielectric relaxation is flexible, founded on very general grounds and circumvents three basic limitations of the conventional sum model of Debye relaxors: the coupling between different polar units, the high frequency transparency problem and the non-inclusion of the effect of coupled non-polar degrees of freedom.