The spin glass-like dynamics of gelatin gels

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that gelatin gels exhibit spin glass-like dynamics, including memory effects and aging, suggesting a shared underlying theoretical framework between these distinct condensed matter systems.

Contribution

It reveals that gelatin gels display spin glass-like behavior, including memory effects and aging, establishing a new analogy between biological gels and magnetic spin glasses.

Findings

Gelatin gels show memory effects similar to spin glasses.

Both systems exhibit critical scaling of kinetics with temperature.

They undergo physical aging with indefinite hardening.

Abstract

We show that there are several striking parallels between the dynamics of gelatin gels and spin glasses. In general, glassy systems retain a memory of their past history. A key characteristic differentiating spin glasses from most other glassy systems is that on cooling they appear to "forget" what happened just below the glass transition temperature, but the memory is recovered on heating. We show that gelatin gels also behave in this way. Both systems show critical scaling of the kinetics with temperature and undergo physical aging, that is they never reach equilibrium, but continue to harden indefinitely at a rate which is linear in log(time). The parallels between the dynamics of these two completely different kinds of condensed matter strongly suggest that they share an underlying theory.