Categories
Disordered Systems electrical conductivity Percolation Random Walks Stochastic Processes Transport Processes

Continuous Time Random Walk Approach to Dynamic Percolation

R. Hilfer, R. Orbach

Chemical Physics 128, 275 (1988)
https://doi.org/10.1016/0301-0104(88)85076-6

submitted on
Friday, September 16, 1988

We present an approximate solution for time (frequency) dependent response under conditions of dynamic percolation which may be related to excitation transfer in some random structures. In particular, we investigate the dynamics of structures where one random component blocks a second (carrier) component. Finite concentrations of the former create a percolation network for the latter. When the blockers are allowed to move in time, the network seen by the carriers changes with time, allowing for long-range transport even if the instantaneous carrier site availability is less than pc, the critical percolation concentration. A specific example of this situation is electrical transport in sodium β”-alumina. The carriersare Na+ ions which can hop on a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. The blockers are ions of much higher activation energy, such as Ba++. We study the frequency dependence of the conductivity for such a system. Given a fixed Ba++ hopping rate the Na+ ions experience a frozen site percolation environment for frequencies larger than the inverse hopping rate. At frequencies smaller than the inverse hopping rate, the Na+ ions experience a dynamic environment which allows long-rangetransport, even below the percoltion threshold. A continuous time random walk mode1 combined with an effective medium approximation allows us to arrive at a numerical solution for the frequency-dependent Na+ conductivity which clearly exhibits the crossover from frozen to dynamic environment.



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