GENERAL PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM
Title: | Universally slow: The physics of aging |
Speaker: | Ariel Amir, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel |
Time: | Wednesday, 6 April, 2011 at 3:15 p.m. |
Place: | Physics Auditorium, 3rd floor, Department of Physics |
Abstract
Glassy systems are ubiquitous in nature, from window glasses, with enormous viscosities making their flow extremely slow, through the anomalous magnetic properties of spin-glasses, to memory effects observed in granular media. Among their key properties are slow relaxations to equilibrium without a typical timescale and aging, the dependence of relaxation on the system's age. Understanding these phenomena is a long-standing problem in physics. We study the aging of the electron glass, a system showing remarkable slow relaxations of the conductance. We find that the broad distribution of relaxation rates leads to a universal relaxation form log(1+ tw/t) for a common aging protocol, where tw is the length of time the perturbation driving the system out-of-equilibrium was on, and t the time of measurement. This universal formula has been found to describe systems ranging from electron glasses, through disordered semiconductors and structural glasses.
Coffee/tea and cake will be served at 3 p.m.
David Field
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Trine Binderup
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Aarhus University
Ny Munkegade 120, building 1525
DK-8000 Aarhus C
e-mail: trinebm@phys.au.dk
Phone: +45 8942 3603
Office: 1525-324