Anomalous Tunneling Systems in Amorphous Organic Materials

We compare the heat release data of organic glasses with that of amorphous and glass-like crystalline solids. Anomalous behavior was found in all these materials, which disagrees with the standard tunneling model. We can explain most of the experimental observations within a phenomenological model, where we assume that for a part of tunneling systems the barrier heights are strongly reduced as a consequence of the local stress produced during the cooling process.