On relaxations and aging of various glasses
  Slow relaxation occurs in many physical and biological systems. `Creep' is an example from everyday life: when stretching a rubber band, for example, the recovery to its equilibrium length is not, as one might think, exponential: the relaxation is slow, in many cases logarithmic, and can still be observed after many hours. The form of the relaxation also depends on the duration of the stretching, the `waiting-time'. This ubiquitous phenomenon iscalled aging, and is abundant both in natural and technological applications. Here, we suggest a general mechanism for slow relaxations and aging, which predicts logarithmic relaxations, and a particular aging dependence on the waiting-time. We demonstrate the generality of the approach by comparing our predictions to experimental data on a diverse range of physical phenomena, from conductance in granular metals, to disordered insulators, and dirty semiconductors, to the low temperature dielectric properties of glasses. 
Ariel Amir, Yuval Oreg and Yoseph Imry
cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.mtrl-sci