The interpretation of thermally stimulated currents obtained by the thermal slicing technique

The measurement of thermally stimulated depolarization currents (TSDCs), especially in the modification known as the thermal slicing (TS) or fractional polarization (FP) technique, is a useful experimental technique for examining the dielectric properties of a variety of systems, including glasses and polymers. It is generally assumed that the TS technique detects, for each polarizing temperature T_p, only a narrow range of states, and that analysis of the TSDC reveals the activation energy and pre-exponential factor of their relaxation time. This interpretation is shown to be very dubious in many cases, and especially for glasses near the glass transition temperature when the states in the system are expected to change with time and temperature. This paper addresses the question of what information about a system can reliably be deduced from TS experiments.