Determination of characteristic relaxation times and their significance in glassy disordered insulators

Thierry Grenet (1) , Julien Delahaye (1)

1 NEEL - MagSup - Magnétisme et Supraconductivité

We revisit the field effect procedure used to characterise the slow dynamics of glassy Anderson insulators. It is shown that in the slowest systems the procedure fails and the "characteristic" time values extracted are not intrinsic but determined by the experimental procedure itself. In other cases (like lightly doped indium oxide) qualitative indications about the dynamics might be obtained, however the times extracted cannot be seen as characteristic relaxation times of the system in any simple manner, and more complete experiments are necessary. Implications regarding the effect of carrier concentration on the emergence of glassiness are briefly outlined.

Mots clés: Disordered solids; Time-dependent properties; relaxation

Domaines: Systèmes désordonnés et réseaux de neurones [cond-mat.dis-nn]

Thierry Grenet, Julien Delahaye. Determination of characteristic relaxation times and their significance in glassy disordered insulators. Physical Review B: Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (1998-2015), 2012, 85, pp.235114. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevB.85.235114⟩. ⟨hal-00590551v2⟩