Non-Equilibrium Universal Features of Annealing and Aging in Granular Piles,

We explore the compaction dynamics of a granular pile after a hard quench from a liquid into the glassy regime. First, we establish that the otherwise athermal granular pile during tapping exhibits annealing behavior comparable to glassy polymer or colloidal systems. The pile undergoes a glass transition and “freezes” into different non-equilibrium glassy states for different annealing speeds, starting from the same initial equilibrium state. Then, we quench the system instantaneously to below the glass transition regime to study the ensuing aging dynamics. In this classical aging protocol, the density increases (i.e., the potential energy of the pile decreases) logarithmically over several decades in time. Instead of system-wide, thermodynamic measures, we identify the intermittent, irreversible events (“quakes”) that actually drive the glassy relaxation process. We find that the event rate decelerates hyperbolically, which explains the observed increase in density when the integrated contribution to the downward displacements is evaluated. We argue that such a hyperbolically decelerating event rate is consistent with a log-Poisson process, also found as a universal feature of aging in many thermal glasses. (Accepted in PNAS, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01991.)