Density fluctuations of water-glucose mixtures studied by inelastic ultra-violet scattering

International audience; The dynamics of density fluctuations of glucose aqueous solutions has been studied in the water rich region by means of Brillouin ultra-violet scattering. The temperature behavior of position and line-width of inelastic peaks gives evidence of a strong relaxation process located in the picosecond timescale. In the approximation of a single exponential process, the relaxation time τ has been obtained for different glucose concentrations, its temperature dependence well described by an Arrhenius law characterized by an activation energy comparable to that of pure water. This result supports the hypothesis that the microscopic mechanism responsible for the main relaxation process in sugar-water solutions is the continuum rearrangement of the H-Bond network. A comparison is also reported with previous results on water trehalose solutions, showing that the acoustic absorption scales with the number of glucoside units for both glucose and trehalose aqueous solutions.