A closer look at
Critical Points: Slow dynamics, aging and their universal features.
Andrea Gambassi
Abstract
The dynamics of statistical systems close to critical points has been
studied theoretically and experimentally over the past three
decades. Nevertheless, only recently it has been fully realized that
critical dynamics provides also a simple instance of slow collective
evolution, typically observed in disordered and complex systems.
The universality which characterizes the critical behavior can be
exploited to provide quantitative predictions for some
aspects of this slow (non-equilibrium) dynamics and of the associated aging
phenomena. Field theory is a natural and viable approach to study
the problem.
In the talk I review some of the theoretical results that have been
obtained in recent years for the relevant (universal) quantities, such
as the fluctation-dissipation ratio, associated with the
non-equilibrium critical dynamics.