Course 7: Dynamics of Glassy Systems

Abstract.

These lecture notes can be read in two ways. The first two sections contain a review of the phenomenology of several physical systems with slow nonequilibrium dynamics. In the Conclusions we summarize the scenario for this temporal evolution derived from the solution to some solvable models (p spin and the like) that are intimately connected to the mode coupling approach (and similar ones) to super-cooled liquids. At the end we list a number of open problems of great relevance in this context. These Sections can be read independently of the body of the paper where we present some of the basic analytic techniques used to study the out of equilibrium dynamics of classical and quantum models with and without disorder. We start the technical part by briefly discussing the role played by the environment and by introducing and comparing its representation in the equilibrium and dynamic treatment of classical and quantum systems. We next explain the role played by explicit quenched disorder in both approaches. Later on we focus on analytical techniques; we expand on the dynamic functional methods, and the diagrammatic expansions and resummations used to derive macroscopic equations from the microscopic dynamics. We show why the macroscopic dynamic equations for disordered models and those resulting from self-consistent approximations to non-disordered ones coincide. We review some generic properties of dynamic systems evolving out of equilibrium like the modifications of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, generic scaling forms of the correlation functions, etc. Finally we solve a family of mean-field models. The connection between the dynamic treatment and the analysis of the free-energy landscape of these models is also presented. We use pedagogical examples all along these lectures to illustrate the properties and results.