Depolarized Rayleigh scattering in 10M amorphous and liquid KOH aqueous solutions

An interpretation of the low frequency Raman scattering in all disordered systems including liquids is suggested in terms of phononlike excitations damped by anharmonicity and by structural relaxations. In principle, owing to the disorder‐induced breakdown of the k vector selection rule, all of these excitations are allowed to participate to the scattering process. An ad hoc simplified model is also proposed to calculate the low frequency Raman scattering, and it is found to reproduce at least qualitatively the main features of the depolarized spectrum in amorphous solid and liquid 10M KOH water solutions at different temperatures.