From laser cooling to aging: A unified Lévy flight description

Abstract

8 pages ; article pédagogiqueInternational audienceIntriguing phenomena such as subrecoil laser cooling of atoms, or aging phenomenon in glasses, have in common that the systems considered do not reach a steady-state during the experiments, although the experimental time scales are very large compared to the microscopic ones. We revisit some standard models describing these phenomena, and reformulate them in a unified framework in terms of lifetimes of the microscopic states of the system. A universal dynamical mechanism emerges, leading to a generic time-dependent distribution of lifetimes, independently of the physical situation considered