Aging is a log-Poisson process, not a renewal process

Aging is a ubiquitous relaxation dynamic in disordered materials. It ensues after a rapid quench from an equilibrium "fluid" state into a nonequilibrium, history-dependent jammed state. We propose a physically motivated description that contrasts sharply with a continuous-time random walk (CTRW) with broadly distributed trapping times commonly used to fit aging data. A renewal process such as CTRW proves irreconcilable with the log-Poisson statistic exhibited, for example, by jammed colloids as well as by disordered magnets. A log-Poisson process is characteristic of the intermittent and decelerating dynamics of jammed matter usually activated by record-breaking fluctuations ("quakes"). We show that such a record dynamics provides a universal model for aging, physically grounded in generic features of free-energy landscapes of disordered systems.