No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2012
We discuss some recent experimental results on the non-stationary dynamics of spin-glasses, which serves as an excellent laboratory for other complex systems. Inspired from Parisi's mean-field solution, we propose that the dynamics of these systems can be though of as a random walk in phase space, between traps characterized by trapping time distribution decaying as a power law. The average exploration time diverges in the spin-glass phase, naturally leading to time-dependent dynamics with a charateristic time scale fixed by the observation time tw itself (aging). By the same token, we find that the correlation function (or the magnetization) decays as a stretched exponential at small times t ≪ tw crossing over to power-law decay at large times t ≫ tw. Finally, we discuss recent speculations on the relevance of these concepts to real glasses, where quenched disorder is a priori absent. Keywords: Aging, slow dynamics, spin-glasses, glasses.