A number of phenomena involving metastability, hysteresis, and slow ``glassy'' relaxation have been observed in sliding--charge-density-wave (CDW) systems. We consider the theoretical behavior expected within a classical model of an elastically deformable CDW pinned by random impurities at a small, but finite temperature. We find that it is important to distinguish between viscous relaxation within a single (metastable) well of the free energy, and processes involving thermal excitation between metastable states. Our results are compared with recent experiments on CDW's, and also with ``glassy'' relaxation phenomena in other systems. We offer some pointers and suggestions for future experimental investigation.
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Littlewood et al. (1988) studied this question.