Aging Random Walks

Abstract

Aging refers to the property of two-time correlation functions to decay very slowly on (at least) two time scales. This phenomenon has gained recent attention due to experimental observations of the history dependent relaxation behavior in amorphous materials (``Glasses'') which pose a challenge to theorist. Aging signals the breaking of time-translational invariance and the violation of the fluctuation dissipation theorem during the relaxation process. But while the origin of aging in disordered media is profound, and the discussion is clad in the language of a well-developed theory, systems as simple as a random walk near a wall can exhibit aging. Such a simple walk serves well to illustrate the phenomenon and some of the physics behind it.