Glassy dynamics, aging and thermally activated avalanches in interface pinning at finite temperatures

Abstract

We study numerically the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of interfaces at finite temperatures when driven well below the zero-temperature depinning threshold. We go further than previous analysis by including the most relevant non-equilibrium correction to the elastic Hamiltonian. We find that the relaxation dynamics towards the steady-state shows glassy behavior, aging and violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The interface roughness exponent alpha approx 0.7 is found to be robust to temperature changes. We also study the instantaneous velocity signal in the low temperature regime and find long-range temporal correlations. We argue 1/f-noise arises from the merging of local thermally-activated avalanches of depinning events.