Natural physical aging in glassy As–Se: A comparative study of chaotic behavior with enhanced results analysis

Abstract Theory of chaos is shown to be adequately applied to analyze kinetics of natural physical aging revealed in structural relaxation of Se-rich As–Se glasses below glass transition. Kinetics of enthalpy losses induced by prolonged storage in natural conditions is used to determine phase space reconstruction parameters. The observed chaotic behavior (involving chaos and fractal consideration such as detrended fluctuation analysis, attractor identification using phase space representation, delay coordinates, mutual information, and false nearest neighbors) reconstructed via TISEAN is treated within potential energy landscape as diversity of multiple transitions between different basins–metabasins towards more thermodynamically equilibrium state, minimizing the free energy of the system. Natural physical aging, facilitates further atomic shrinkage of the glass backbone.