Thermal Relaxation and Brillouin Scattering in Liquids

Weak coupling of internal degrees of freedom of molecules to the translational degrees of freedom of a fluid results in additional modes of motion for density fluctuations. These new modes affect the spectral distribution of light scattered by density fluctuations so that the Landau-Placzek ratio is not satisfied. The case of thermal relaxation with a single relaxation time is worked out in detail. Formulas for the spectral distribution of the scattered light, for the ratio of the intensities of the central (Rayleigh) to the Brillouin components and for the phonon velocity are derived and applied to carbon disulfide and carbon tetrachloride. The data for carbon tetrachloride are shown to be inconsistent with the single relaxation time model for thermal relaxation.