Subdiffusion and intermittent dynamic fluctuations in the aging regime of concentrated hard spheres

Abstract

We study the nonequilibrium aging dynamics in a system of quasihard spheres at large density by means of computer simulations. We find that, after a sudden quench to large density, the relaxation time initially increases exponentially with the age of the system. After a surprisingly large crossover time, the system enters the asymptotic aging regime characterized by a nearly linear increase in the relaxation time with age. In this aging regime, single-particle motion is strongly non-Fickian, with a mean-squared displacement increasing subdiffusively, associated with broad non-Gaussian tails in the distribution of particle displacements. We find that the system ages through temporally intermittent relaxation events, and a detailed finite-size analysis of these collective dynamic fluctuations reveals that these events are not spanning the entire system, but remain spatially localized. © 2010 The American Physical Society.