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

Abstract

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.

published with minor proof corrections

References in corpus (6)

• Electron Glass Dynamics
• Temperature and field dependence of Dynamics in the Electron-Glass
• Slow conductance relaxations; Distinguishing the Electron Glass from extrinsic mechanisms
• Huge (but finite) time scales in slow relaxations: beyond simple aging
• Manifestation of ageing in the low temperature conductance of disordered insulators
• Memory effects in transport through a hopping insulator: Understanding two-dip experiments

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Ulta-slow relaxation in discontinuous-film based electron glasses
• Memory Effects in the Electron Glass
• Observation of thermally activated glassiness and memory dip in a-NbSi insulating thin films
• Electron glass effects in amorphous NbSi films
• Evidence for thermal activation in the glassy dynamics of insulating granular aluminum conductance
• Electron glass signatures up to room temperature in disordered insulators
• Quantum Memory Effects in Disordered Systems and Their Relation to 1/f Noise
• Anomalous thermal activation of the electron glass dynamics in a-InOx and granular aluminum