Physical Aging of Classical Oscillators

Abstract

Aging is a familiar phenomenon from glassy systems like spin glasses and materials with slow relaxation processes, breaking of time-translation invariance, and dynamical scaling. We study aging in active rotators and Kuramoto oscillators that are coupled with frustrated bonds. The induced multiplicity of attractors of fixed-point or limit-cycle solutions leads to a rough potential landscape. When the system is exposed to noise, the oscillator phases migrate through this landscape and generate a multitude of different escape times from one metastable state to the next. When the system is quenched from the regime of a unique fixed point toward the regime of multistable limit-cycle solutions, the autocorrelation functions depend on the waiting time after the quench and show dynamical scaling. In this way we uncover a common mechanism behind aging in quite different realizations.