2003/06/03 by Alan Parker, Parker, Alan, Valery Normand +2
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Mathematical Theories and Applications #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0306056
9 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2003/06/03 · openalex publication_date 2003/06/03 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that there are several striking parallels between the dynamics of gelatin gels and spin glasses. In general, glassy systems retain a memory of their past history. A key characteristic differentiating spin glasses from most other glassy systems is that on cooling they appear to "forget" what happened just below the glass transition temperature, but the memory is recovered on heating. We show that gelatin gels also behave in this way. Both systems show critical scaling of the kinetics with temperature and undergo physical aging, that is they never reach equilibrium, but continue to harden indefinitely at a rate which is linear in log(time). The parallels between the dynamics of these two completely different kinds of condensed matter strongly suggest that they share an underlying theory.