Intermittent relaxation in hierarchical energy landscapes

TL;DR

This paper models the thermalization process in hierarchical energy landscapes, revealing intermittent energy dissipation bursts and Gaussian fluctuations, which explain energy flow in complex metastable systems.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical simulation of energy relaxation in hierarchical landscapes, demonstrating the role of record-sized fluctuations in intermittent energy dissipation.

Findings

Energy surplus dissipates in intermittent bursts or quakes.

Energy fluctuations within a metastable state are Gaussian and do not cause dissipation.

The energy dissipation rate decreases with system age and follows a temperature-dependent pattern.

Abstract

We numerically simulate a thermalization process in an energy landscape with hierarchically organized metastable states. The initial configuration is chosen to have a large energy excess, relative to the thermal equilibrium value at the running temperature. We show that the initial energy surplus is dissipated in a series of intermittent bursts, or quakes, whose rate decreases as the inverse of the age of the system. In addition, one observes energy fluctuations with a zero centered Gaussian distribution. These pertain to the pseudo equilibrium dynamics within a single metastable state, and do not contribute to the energy dissipation. The derivative of the thermal energy with respect to the logarithm of time is asymptotically constant, and comprises a temperature independent part, and a part with an Arrhenius temperature dependence. The findings closely mirror recent numerical simulation results obtained for microscopic glassy models. For these models, record-sized energy fluctuations have been claimed to trigger intermittent events during low temperature thermalization. In the present model record-sized fluctuations are by construction needed to trigger changes from one metastable state to another. This property thus suffices to explain the statistical property of intermittent energy flow in complex metastable systems.