  Aqueous suspension of nanoclay Laponite undergoes structural evolution as a
function of time, which enhances its elasticity and relaxation time. In this
work we employ effective time approach to investigate long term relaxation
dynamics by carrying out creep experiments. Typically we observe that the
monotonic evolution of elastic modulus shifts to lower aging times while maxima
in viscous modulus gets progressively broader for experiments carried out on a
later date since preparation (idle time) of nanoclay suspension. Application of
effective time theory produces superposition of all the creep curves
irrespective of their initial state. The resulting dependence of relaxation
time on aging time shows very strong hyper aging dynamics at small idle times,
which progressively weakens to demonstrate linear dependence in the limit of
very large idle times. Remarkably this behavior of nanoclay suspension is akin
to that observed for polymeric glasses. Consideration of aging as a first order
process suggests that continued hyper-aging dynamics causes cessation of aging.
The dependence of relaxation time on aging time, therefore, must attenuate
eventually producing linear or weaker dependence on time in order to approach
progressively low energy state in the limit of very large times as observed
experimentally. We also develop a simple scaling model based on a concept of
aging of an energy well, which qualitatively captures various experimental
observations very well leading to profound insight into the hyper-aging
dynamics of nano-clay suspensions.
