Physical age of soft-jammed systems

We study experimentally the liquid-solid transition in a soft-jammed system and focus on its aging in the solid regime. We investigate the impact of temperature, density, and load changes on the material behavior. We show that all elastic modulus versus time curves fall on a single master curve when rescaled by an appropriate factor function of the density, the temperature, the load, and the time elapsed since preshear. This allows us to distinguish the effect of temperature and density on the mechanical properties and their effect on aging. Since the time evolutions of the elastic modulus under various conditions are similar within a factor, we suggest that the rescaled time reflects the physical age of the material; i.e., it describes the degree of progress of the structural organization relative to a state of reference of the system in the solid regime and constitutes a means for characterizing the effective state of such systems.