Spin-glass--like aging in colloidal and granular glasses

TL;DR

This study reveals a sharp crossover in the off-equilibrium dynamics of colloidal and granular glasses, indicating a transition from normal to anomalous aging behavior at a specific pressure, akin to spin-glass systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a Gardner-like transition in three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, linking glassy dynamics to spin-glass universality.

Findings

A crossover pressure $P_G$ separates two dynamical regimes.

For $P < P_G$, the system behaves as a normal solid.

For $P > P_G$, the system exhibits aging and anomalous dynamics.

Abstract

Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for colloidal or granular glasses. Deep inside the glass phase, we find that a sharp crossover pressure $P_{\rm G}$ separates two distinct dynamical regimes. For pressure $P < P_{\rm G}$, the glass behaves as a normal solid, displaying fast dynamics that quickly equilibrates within the glass free energy basin. For $P>P_{\rm G}$, instead, the dynamics becomes strongly anomalous, displaying very large equilibration time scales, aging, and a constantly increasing dynamical susceptibility. The crossover at $P_{\rm G}$ is strongly reminiscent of the one observed in three-dimensional spin-glasses in an external field, suggesting that the two systems could be in the same universality class, consistently with theoretical expectations.