
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external conditions. Instead, amorphous materials often exhibit physical aging: an ever-slowing, nonexponential relaxation that can span a huge range of timescales. Here, we examine the aging behavior of three different amorphous materials subjected to slow periodic driving. The results reveal a generic aging phenomenon characterized by a logarithmic decay of dissipation per cycle. This observation is evaluated against several mesoscopic models of amorphous matter that successfully capture aging under static conditions: i) a collection of noninteracting relaxation processes ii) a noisy hysteron model with random pairwise interactions, and iii) a structural model consisting of a random network of bistable elastic bonds. We find that only the latter model reproduces all experimental findings and relates its success to its persistent, slow exploration of a complex energy landscape with clear signatures of replica symmetry breaking. Thus, cyclic driving emerges as a simple yet powerful protocol to characterize amorphous materials, probe their complex energy landscapes, and distinguish between different models.
Amorphous materials, Aging, Cyclic driving, Physical Sciences, Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft), FOS: Physical sciences, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn), Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter, Condensed Matter - Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Amorphous materials, Aging, Cyclic driving, Physical Sciences, Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft), FOS: Physical sciences, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn), Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter, Condensed Matter - Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
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