Event

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 the structure and localization properties of these modes, and their implications.