Related papers: Replenish and relax: explaining logarithmic anneal…
Many complex and disordered systems fail to reach equilibrium after they have been quenched or perturbed. Instead, they sluggishly relax toward equilibrium at an ever-slowing, history-dependent rate, a process termed physical aging. The…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
A general kind of models with hierarchically constrained dynamics is shown to exhibit logarithmic anomalous relaxation, similarly to a variety of complex strongly interacting materials. The logarithmic behavior describes most of the decay…
Slow relaxation occurs in many physical and biological systems. `Creep' is an example from everyday life: when stretching a rubber band, for example, the recovery to its equilibrium length is not, as one might think, exponential: the…
Disordered materials under an imposed forcing can display creep and aging effects, accompanied by intermittent, spatially heterogeneous dynamics. We propose a unifying microscopic description of these phenomena, based on the notion that as…
We discuss relaxation and aging processes in the one- and two-dimensional $ABC$ models. In these driven diffusive systems of three particle types, biased exchanges in one direction yield a coarsening process characterized in the long time…
On the basis of physical considerations we propose a one-dimensional discrete lattice model for the density relaxation of granular materials under tapping. Solving the difference equation numerically, we find a logarithmic time-dependence…
The process of structural relaxation in disordered solids subjected to repeated tension-compression loading is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. The binary glass is prepared by rapid cooling well below the glass transition…
We use X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to investigate the structural relaxation process in a metallic glass on the atomic length scale. We report evidence for a dynamical crossover between the supercooled liquid phase and the…
Complex systems having metastable elements often demonstrate nearly log-time relaxations and a kind of aging: repeated stimuli weaken the system's relaxational response. Granular matter is known to exhibit a wealth of such behaviors, for…
Experiments performed in the last years demonstrated slow relaxations and aging in the conductance of a large variety of materials. Here, we present experimental and theoretical results for conductance relaxation and aging for the…
The aging dynamics of a colloidal glass has been studied by multiangle Dynamic Light Scattering, Neutron Spin Echo, X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy and Molecular Dynamics simulations. The two relaxation processes, microscopic (fast)…
We present a method to determine the equilibrium geometry of large atomistic systems with linear scaling. It is based on a separate treatment of long and short wavelength components of the forces. While the rapidly varying part is handled…
Recently, different numerical studies of coarsening in disordered systems have shown the existence of a crossover from an initial, transient, power-law domain growth to a slower, presumably logarithmic, growth. However, due to the very slow…
Fatigue refers to the changes in material properties caused by repeatedly applied loads. It has been widely studied for, e.g., construction materials, but much less has been done on soft materials. Here, we characterize the fatigue dynamics…
The structural relaxation of amorphous materials is described as arising from the superposition of elementary processes with varying activation energies. We show that it is possible to obtain the kinetic parameters of these processes from…
The relaxation to equilibrium of lattice systems with long-range interactions is investigated. The timescales involved depend polynomially on the system size, potentially leading to diverging equilibration times. A kinetic equation for…
A simple lattice gas model with random fields and gravity is introduced to describe a system of grains moving in a disordered environment. Off equilibrium relaxations of bulk density and its two time correlation functions are numerically…
Ba\v{z}ant's microprestress theory relates the logarithmic basic creep of concrete to power-law relaxation of heterogeneous eigenstresses at the nanoscale. However, the link between material chemistry, nanostructure, and microprestress…
Structural mechanisms in disordered materials like amorphous semi-conductors and glasses can be explored with the activation-relaxation technique (ART). The application of a sequence of such mechanisms allows for the generation of…