Spin-glass-like aging in colloidal and granular glasses

Abstract

Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a “normal glass” and a “marginally stable glass”, we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for colloidal or granular glasses. Deep inside the glass phase, we find that a sharp crossover pressure P_G separates two distinct dynamical regimes. For pressure P < P_G, the glass behaves as a normal solid, displaying fast dynamics that quickly equilibrate within the glass free energy basin. For P > P_G, instead, the dynamics become strongly anomalous, displaying very large equilibration timescales, aging, and a constantly increasing dynamical susceptibility. The crossover at P_G is strongly reminiscent of the one observed in three-dimensional spin-glasses in an external field, suggesting that the two systems could be in the same universality class, consistent with theoretical expectations.