The dielectric response of condensed matter below microwave frequencies has been known to depart from the Debye behavior, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable and yet the generally accepted interpretations of the departures have seldom deviated from the Debye philosophy of simple relaxation phenomena in noninteracting systems. It was recently recognized, from a synoptic view of the experimental data involving a wide range of materials, that there exists a remarkable universality of dielectric response behavior regardless of physical structure, types of bonding, chemical type, polarizing species, and geometrical configurations. This strongly suggests that there should exist a correspondingly universal mechanism of dielectric polarization in condensed matter. The present work proposes such a universal mechanism associated with the existence of some ubiquitous very-low-energy excitations in the system. These excitations exhibit an infrared-divergent-like response to transitions of the polarizing species induced by a time-varying electric field in the dielectric and give rise to the universal dielectric response.

• Received 15 March 1979

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.20.2475