Glassy dynamics, aging and thermally activated avalanches in interface pinning at finite temperatures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-equilibrium, glassy relaxation dynamics of driven interfaces at finite temperatures, revealing aging, violation of fluctuation-dissipation, and 1/f noise from avalanches, extending understanding beyond zero-temperature depinning.

Contribution

It introduces the most relevant non-equilibrium correction to the elastic Hamiltonian and demonstrates its effects on interface dynamics, including aging and correlated avalanches.

Findings

Glassy relaxation and aging observed in interface dynamics.

Robust roughness exponent alpha approx 0.7 across temperatures.

Long-range temporal correlations and 1/f noise linked to avalanches.

Abstract

We study numerically the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of interfaces at finite temperatures when driven well below the zero-temperature depinning threshold. We go further than previous analysis by including the most relevant non-equilibrium correction to the elastic Hamiltonian. We find that the relaxation dynamics towards the steady-state shows glassy behavior, aging and violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The interface roughness exponent alpha approx 0.7 is found to be robust to temperature changes. We also study the instantaneous velocity signal in the low temperature regime and find long-range temporal correlations. We argue 1/f-noise arises from the merging of local thermally-activated avalanches of depinning events.