EVIDENCE OF AGING IN GLASSY CHALCOGENIDES: NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS IN THE ELECTRON GLASS MODEL

In this work we present a numerical study showing the presence of aging in glassy chalcogenides, based on an efficient Monte Carlo algorithm previously developed by some of us, employed for studying energy relaxation in Coulomb glasses. Some recent experiments have shown the relationship between glassy non-oxide chalcogenides and the Coulomb glass model, so we have employed our algorithm to numerically reproduce a typical aging experiment and determine an aging law in terms of the waiting time, tw, and the relaxation time, t. The algorithm is specifically designed to study the relaxation of the total energy of the system and can reach greater simulation times than other previous methods. We have found a strong dependence of the relaxation energy on both t and tw, which is indicative of aging in the system. Since our method reaches large times we can study in detail the influence of the waiting time on the aging phenomenon, a topic not discussed in much detail in numerical simulations so far. To complete the numerical study, we present the scalable dependence of the aging simulation in terms of tw and t, for several values of the waiting time.