Aging in the Linear Harmonic Oscillator

TL;DR

This paper investigates aging and non-equilibrium dynamics in a simple model of non-interacting harmonic oscillators, revealing entropic barriers and glassy features like activated behavior and aging.

Contribution

It demonstrates that even non-interacting harmonic oscillators can exhibit glassy aging phenomena due to entropic barriers in their configuration space.

Findings

Observation of activated-type behavior in the dynamics.

Evidence of aging in correlation and response functions.

Model displays a one-step relaxation process.

Abstract

The low temperature Monte Carlo dynamics of an ensemble of linear harmonic oscillators shows some entropic barriers related to the difficulty of finding the directions in configurational space which decrease the energy. This mechanism is enough to observe some typical non-equilibrium features of glassy systems like activated-type behavior and aging in the correlation function and in the response function. Due to the absence of interactions the model only displays a one-step relaxation process.