A new universality class of aging in glassy systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal aging relaxation law in glassy systems, specifically in electron glasses, demonstrating broad applicability across different materials and observables, and proposing a new theoretical framework for understanding aging phenomena.

Contribution

It presents a novel universal relaxation form for aging in glassy systems based on the distribution of relaxation rates, supported by experimental data across various glasses.

Findings

Universal log(1+t_w/t) relaxation form observed

Agreement with experiments on different glasses and observables

Proposes a new paradigm for aging in glassy materials

Abstract

Glassy systems are ubiquitous in nature, and are characterized by slow relaxations to equilibrium without a typical timescale, aging and memory effects. Understanding these is a long-standing problem in physics. We study the aging of the electron glass, a system showing remarkable slow relaxations in the conductance. We find that the broad distribution of relaxation rates leads to a universal relaxation of the form log(1+t_w/t) for the usual aging protocol, where t_w is the length of time the perturbation driving the system out-of-equilibrium was on, and t the time of measurement. These results agree well with several experiments performed on different glasses, and examining different physical observables, for times ranging from seconds to several hours. The suggested theoretical framework appears to offer a paradigm for aging in a broad class of glassy materials.