Dynamic Compressibility and aging in Wigner crystals and quantum glasses

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-equilibrium response of quantum elastic systems with disorder, revealing aging effects and a crossover in compressibility that can be experimentally observed in Wigner glasses.

Contribution

It introduces a combined real-time and mean-field approach to analyze aging and compressibility in disordered quantum systems, highlighting a crossover behavior.

Findings

Identification of a quasi-equilibrium regime with analytic continuation validity

Discovery of an aging regime affecting system response

Prediction of a crossover in compressibility from dynamic to static values

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium linear response of quantum elastic systems pinned by quenched disorder with Schwinger-Keldysh real-time techniques complemented by a mean-field variational approach. We find (i) a quasi-equilibrium regime in which the analytic continuation from the imaginary-time replica results holds provided the marginality condition is enforced; (ii) an aging regime. The conductivity and compressibility are computed. The latter is found to cross over from its dynamic to static value on a scale set by the waiting time after a quench, an effect which can be probed in experiments in {\it e.g.} Wigner glasses.