Eric R. Weeks, Rachel Courtland

Aging is the slow evolution of a nonequilibrium material, and occurs in metals, glasses, and granular
media. We directly observe the aging of a colloidal glass using confocal microscopy. Slight relaxations in
the aging sample involve small regions of rearranging particles, and the time scale for these relaxations
increases as the age of the sample increases. We attempt to describe these rearrangements and their
origin, to provide a real-space picture of the dynamics of aging.