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 ******************************* 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