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.