graduate

Universally slow

TYPECondensed Matter Seminar
Speaker:Ariel Amir
Affiliation:Harvard university
Date:13.11.2012
Time:14:30
Location:Lidow Nathan Rosen (300)
Abstract:

Glassy systems are very common in nature, from disordered


electronic and magnetic systems to window glasses and crumpled paper.


Among their key properties are slow relaxations to equilibrium without


a typical timescale, and dependence of relaxation on the system's age.


Understanding these phenomena is a long-standing problem in physics.


After reviewing some of these physical systems, I will describe our


approach to the problem, and show how it leads to a novel class of


aging. The slow relaxations result from a broad distribution of


`relaxation eigenmodes’, which relates to a particular class of random


matrices. I will discuss recent results on the structure and


localization properties of these modes, and their implications.