  The far-from-equilibrium dynamics of glassy systems share important
phenomenological traits. A transition is generally observed from a
time-homogeneous dynamical regime to an aging regime where physical changes
occur intermittently and, on average, at a decreasing rate. It has been
suggested that a global change of the independent time variable to its
logarithm may render the aging dynamics homogeneous: for colloids, this entails
diffusion but on a logarithmic time scale. Our novel analysis of experimental
colloid data confirms that the mean square displacement grows linearly in time
at low densities and shows that it grows linearly in the logarithm of time at
high densities. Correspondingly, pairs of particles initially in close contact
survive as pairs with a probability which decays exponentially in either time
or its logarithm. The form of the Probability Density Function of the
displacements shows that long-ranged spatial correlations are very long-lived
in dense colloids. A phenomenological stochastic model is then introduced which
relies on the growth and collapse of strongly correlated clusters ("dynamic
heterogeneity"), and which reproduces the full spectrum of observed colloidal
behaviors depending on the form assumed for the probability that a cluster
collapses during a Monte Carlo update. In the limit where large clusters
dominate, the collapse rate is ~1/t, implying a homogeneous, log-Poissonian
process that qualitatively reproduces the experimental results for dense
colloids. Finally an analytical toy-model is discussed to elucidate the strong
dependence of the simulation results on the integrability (or lack thereof) of
the cluster collapse probability function.
