From laser cooling to aging: a unified Levy flight description

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified framework using Levy flights to describe diverse non-equilibrium phenomena like laser cooling and aging in glasses, revealing a universal dynamical mechanism governing their dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, unified model based on microscopic state lifetimes that explains different non-steady phenomena across physical systems.

Findings

Identification of a universal distribution of lifetimes

Unified description of laser cooling and aging phenomena

Discovery of a common dynamical mechanism

Abstract

Intriguing phenomena such as subrecoil laser cooling of atoms, or aging phenomenon in glasses, have in common that the systems considered do not reach a steady-state during the experiments, although the experimental time scales are very large compared to the microscopic ones. We revisit some standard models describing these phenomena, and reformulate them in a unified framework in terms of lifetimes of the microscopic states of the system. A universal dynamical mechanism emerges, leading to a generic time-dependent distribution of lifetimes, independently of the physical situation considered.