No Arabic abstract
Structural heterogeneity of amorphous solids present difficult challenges that stymie the prediction of plastic events, which are intimately connected to their mechanical behavior. Based on a perturbation analysis of the potential energy landscape, we derive the atomic nonaffinity as an indicator with intrinsic orientation, which quantifies the contribution of an individual atom to the total nonaffine modulus of the system. We find that the atomic nonaffinity can efficiently characterize the locations of the shear transformation zones, with a predicative capacity comparable to the best indicators. More importantly, the atomic nonaffinity, combining the sign of third order derivative of energy with respect to coordinates, reveals an intrinsic softest shear orientation. By analyzing the angle between this orientation and the shear loading direction, it is possible to predict the protocol-dependent response of plastic events. Employing the new method, the distribution of orientations of shear transformation zones in a model two-dimensional amorphous solids can be measured. The resulting plastic events can be understood from a simple model of independent plastic events occurring at variously oriented shear transformation zones. These results shed light on the characterization and prediction of the mechanical response of amorphous solids.
While perfect crystals may exhibit a purely elastic response to shear all the way to yielding, the response of amorphous solids is punctuated by plastic events. The prevalence of this plasticity depends on the number of particles $N$ of the system, with the average strain interval before the first plastic event, $overline{Deltagamma}$, scaling like $N^alpha$ with $alpha$ negative: larger samples are more susceptible to plasticity due to more numerous disorder-induced soft spots. In this paper we examine this scaling relation in ultra-stable glasses prepared with the Swap Monte Carlo algorithm, with regard to the possibility of protocol-dependent scaling exponent, which would also imply a protocol dependence in the distribution of local yield stresses in the glass. We show that, while a superficial analysis seems to corroborate this hypothesis, this is only a pre-asymptotic effect and in fact our data can be well explained by a simple model wherein such protocol dependence is absent.
The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the response of such athermal solids are governed by local conditions of mechanical equilibrium, i.e., force and torque balance of its constituents. Here we show that these constraints have the mathematical structure of a generalized electromagnetism, where the electrostatic limit successfully captures the anisotropic elasticity of amorphous solids. The emergence of elasticity from local mechanical constraints offers a new paradigm for systems with no broken symmetry, analogous to emergent gauge theories of quantum spin liquids. Specifically, our $U(1)$ rank-2 symmetric tensor gauge theory of elasticity translates to the electromagnetism of fractonic phases of matter with the stress mapped to electric displacement and forces to vector charges. We corroborate our theoretical results with numerical simulations of soft frictionless disks in both two and three dimensions, and experiments on frictional disks in two dimensions. We also present experimental evidence indicating that force chains in granular media are sub-dimensional excitations of amorphous elasticity similar to fractons.
We study a mesoscopic model for the flow of amorphous solids. The model is based on the key features identified at the microscopic level, namely peri- ods of elastic deformation interspersed with localised rearrangements of parti- cles that induce long-range elastic deformation. These long-range deformations are derived following a continuum mechanics approach, in the presence of solid boundaries, and are included in full in the model. Indeed, they mediate spatial cooperativity in the flow, whereby a localised rearrangement may lead a distant region to yield. In particular, we simulate a channel flow and find manifestations of spatial cooperativity that are consistent with published experimental obser- vations for concentrated emulsions in microchannels. Two categories of effects are distinguished. On the one hand, the coupling of regions subject to different shear rates, for instance,leads to finite shear rate fluctuations in the seemingly un- sheared plug in the centre of the channel. On the other hand, there is convinc- ing experimental evidence of a specific rheology near rough walls. We discuss diverse possible physical origins for this effect, and we suggest that it may be associated with the bumps of particles into surface asperities as they slide along the wall.
Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is well established, however, that the apparent linearity of stress with strain is actually a proxy for a much more complex behavior, with a microscopic plasticity that is reflected in diverging nonlinear elastic coefficients. Very generally, the complex structure of the energy landscape is expected to induce a singular response to small perturbations. In the athermal quasistatic regime, this response manifests itself in the form of a scale free plastic activity. The distribution of the corresponding avalanches should reflect, according to theoretical mean field calculations (Franz and Spigler, Phys. Rev. E., 2017, 95, 022139), the geometry of phase space in the vicinity of a typical local minimum. In this work, we characterize this distribution for simple models of glass forming systems, and we find that its scaling is compatible with the mean field predictions for systems above the jamming transition. These systems exhibit marginal stability, and scaling relations that hold in the stationary state are examined and confirmed in the elastic regime. By studying the respective influence of system size and age, we suggest that marginal stability is systematic in the thermodynamic limit.
We study the structural origin of the Bauschinger effect by accessing numerically the local plastic thresholds in the steady state flow of a two-dimensional model glass under athermal quasistatic deformation. More specifically, we compute the local residual strength, $Deltatau^{c}$, for arbitrary loading orientations and find that plastic deformation generically induces material polarization, i.e., a forward-backward asymmetry in the $Deltatau^{c}$ distribution. In steady plastic flow, local packings are on average closer to forward (rather than backward) instabilities, due to the stress-induced bias of barriers. However, presumably due to mechanical noise, a significant fraction of zones lie close to reverse (backward) yielding, as the distribution of $Deltatau^{c}$ for reverse shearing extends quasilinearly down to zero local residual strength. By constructing an elementary model of the early plastic response, we then show that unloading causes reverse plasticity of a growing amplitude, i.e., reverse softening, while it shifts away forward-yielding barriers. This result in an inversion of polarization in the low-$Deltatau^{c}$ region and, consequently, in the Bauschinger effect. This scenario is quite generic, which explains the pervasiveness of the effect.