Related papers: Kovacs effects in an aging molecular liquid

The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…

Understanding glasses is considered to be one of the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. A theoretical approach to unravel their universal properties is to consider the validity of equilibrium concepts such as temperature and…

We investigate the memory effect in a simple model for glassy relaxation, a trap model with a Gaussian density of states. In this model thermal equilibrium is reached at all finite temperatures and therefore we can consider jumps from low…

We develop a mesoscopic model to study the plastic behavior of an amorphous material under cyclic loading. The model is depinning-like and driven by a disordered thresholds dynamics which are coupled by long-range elastic interactions. We…

We analyse the emergence of Kovacs-like memory effects in athermal systems within the linear response regime. This is done by starting from both the master equation for the probability distribution and the equations for the physically…

The understanding of the dynamics of nonequilibrium cooling and heating processes at the nanoscale is still an open problem. These processes can follow surprising relaxation paths due to, e.g., memory effects, which significantly alter the…

We use coherent X-rays to probe the aging dynamics of a metallic glass directly on the atomic level. Contrary to the common assumption of a steady slowing down of the dynamics usually observed in macroscopic studies, we show that the…

We observe non-monotonic aging and memory effects, two hallmarks of glassy dynamics, in two disordered mechanical systems: crumpled thin sheets and elastic foams. Under fixed compression, both systems exhibit monotonic non-exponential…

The relaxation dynamics of many disordered systems, such as structural glasses, proteins, granular materials or spin glasses, is not completely frozen even at very low temperatures. This residual motion leads to a change of the properties…

Experiments performed on a wide range of glassy materials display many interesting phenomena, such as aging behavior. In recent years, a large body of experiments probed this nonequilibrium glassy dynamics through elaborate protocols, in…

Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the connection between thermal history and physical aging in polymer glasses, in particular the effects of a temperature square step. Measurements of two-time correlation functions show…

Several papers have recently presented results of measurements of physical aging by studying the behavior of glassy materials quenched from temperatures above their glass transition temperature $T_g$. The evolution of the aging process is…

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 phenomenon recently coined as ``overaging'' implies a slowdown in the collective (slow) relaxation modes of a glass when a transient shear strain is imposed. We are able to reproduce this behavior in simulations of a supercooled polymer…

The random first order transition theory of the dynamics of supercooled liquids is extended to treat aging phenomena in nonequilibrium structural glasses. A reformulation of the idea of ``entropic droplets'' in terms of libraries of local…

Aging in an attraction-driven colloidal glass is studied by computer simulations. The system is equilibrated without attraction and instantaneously ``quenched'', at constant colloid volume fraction, to one of two states beyond the glass…

Thermo-osmotic flows, generated by applying a thermal gradient along a liquid-solid interface, could be harnessed to convert waste heat into electricity. While this phenomenon has been known for almost a century, there is a crucial need to…

We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…

In this paper, we review the general features of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of spin glasses. We use this example as a guideline for a brief description of glassy dynamics in other disordered systems like structural and polymer glasses,…

We model the dynamics of a closed quantum system brought out of mechanical equilibrium, undergoing a non-driven, spontaneous, thermodynamic transformation. In particular, we consider a quantum particle in a box with a moving and insulating…