Analysis of thermally stimulated currents measured on ionic conductors

We propose a new method for analyzing the experimental results obtained from thermally stimulated depolarization current experiments on ionic conductors. This method is based on a model developed to explain polarization in these materials. The fundamental assumptions about the elementary mechanisms responsible for polarization is assumed to be due to the ''free'' volume created by thermal fluctuations occurring in solids near the equilibrium state. The consequence of these fluctuations is a statistical distribution of the relaxation times or energies, which can be evidenced by the thermal windowing technique, and then analyzed by relaxation map analysis, Applied to two typical ionic compounds, the method described in this work allows us to determine more realistic values of energy and tau(0), corresponding to the measured relaxation times. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.