Stretched-Exponential Aging Governs Nonequilibrium Precipitate Patterns
Abstract
Localized growth in driven materials is often governed by intermittent failure, yet how a material's history biases failure sites remains poorly understood. Using pause-restart experiments on chemical precipitate membranes, we quantify the probability of age-dependent breaching. We show that the kinetics follow a stretched-exponential aging law with parameters that obey one-parameter scaling. As the system approaches a critical concentration, the stretching exponent tends to zero, signaling a crossover to scale-free, power-law behavior. A stochastic cellular automaton based on this aging rule reproduces the emergent filaments and their concentration-dependent thickening. Our findings identify aging-controlled failure with long-lived but decaying memory as a general route to pattern formation in far-from-equilibrium systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.07183,
title = {Stretched-Exponential Aging Governs Nonequilibrium Precipitate Patterns},
author = {Amari Morris and Oliver Steinbock},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.07183},
year = {2026}
}