Avalanches in the Relaxation Dynamics of Electron Glasses

Abstract

We study the zero-temperature relaxation dynamics of an electron glass model with single-electron hops. We find numerically that in the charge rearrangements (avalanches) triggered by displacing an electron, the number of electron hops has a scale-free, power-law distribution up to a cutoff diverging with the system size $N$, independently of the disorder strength and provided hops of arbitrary length are allowed. In avalanches triggered by the injection of an extra electron, the distribution does not have a power-law limit, but its mean diverges non-trivially with $N$. In both cases, the avalanche statistics is well reproduced by a branching process model that assumes independent hops. Qualitative differences with avalanches in infinite-range spin glasses and related systems are discussed.