Field theory of statics and dynamics of glasses: rare events and barrier distributions

Leon Balents; Pierre Le Doussal

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Field theory of statics and dynamics of glasses: rare events and barrier distributions

Leon Balents·Pierre Le Doussal

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Abstract

We study thermally activated dynamics using functional renormalization within the field theory of randomly pinned elastic systems, a prototype for glasses. It appears through an essentially non-perturbative boundary layer in the running effective action, for which we find a consistent scaling ansatz to all orders. We find that in the statics the boundary layer describes the physics of rare low energy metastable states as suggested by a phenomenological droplet picture. The extension to equilibrium dynamics mandates a non-trivial broad distribution of relaxation times for the large scale modes, hitherto neglected in analytic calculations.

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Leon Balents, Pierre Le Doussal. 2002-05-16. Field theory of statics and dynamics of glasses: rare events and barrier distributions. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0205358

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