Extreme fluctuations driving the relaxation in glassy energy landscapes

Cooperative events requiring a rare large fluctuation are a defining characteristic for the onset of glassy relaxation across many materials. The importance of such intermittent events has been noted in systems as diverse as superconductors, metallic glasses, gels, colloids, and granular piles. Here, we show that prohibiting the attainment of new record-high energy fluctuations - by explicitly imposing a lidon the fluctuation spectrum - impedes further relaxation in the glassy phase. This lid allows us to directly measure the impact of record events on the evolving system in extensive simulations of aging in such vastly distinct glass formers as spin glasses and tapped granular piles. Interpreting our results in terms of a dynamics of records succeeds in explaining the ubiquity of both, the logarithmic decay of the energy and the memory effects encoded in the scaling of two-time correlation functions of aging systems. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Research shows that restricting the impact of energy fluctuations on records is crucial for the evolution of systems during glassy relaxation.