Related papers: Statistical Physics of the Yielding Transition in …

Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…

Amorphous solids lack long-range order. Therefore identifying structural defects -- akin to dislocations in crystalline solids -- that carry plastic flow in these systems remains a daunting challenge. By comparing many different structural…

We study the solid-to-liquid transition in a two-dimensional fully periodic soft-glassy model with an imposed spatially heterogeneous stress. The model we consider consists of droplets of a dispersed phase jammed together in a continuous…

Yield-stress materials, which require a sufficiently large forcing to flow, are currently ill-understood theoretically. To gain insight into their yielding transition, here we study numerically the rheology of a suspension of deformable…

Plastic yield of amorphous solids occurs by power law distributed slip avalanches whose universality is still debated. Determination of the power law exponents from experiments and molecular dynamics simulations is hampered by limited…

Polymer glasses have numerous advantageous mechanical properties in comparison to other materials. One of the most useful is the high degree of toughness that can be achieved due to significant yield occurring in the material. Remarkably,…

Large scale molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study the steady state yielding dynamics of a well established simple glass. In contrast to the supercooled state, where the shear stress, $\sigma$, tends to zero at vanishing…

Stress vs. strain fluctuations in athermal amorphous solids are an example of `crackling noise' of the type studied extensively in the context of elastic membranes moving through random potentials. Contrary to the latter, we do not have a…

It is shown here that fracture after a brief plastic strain, typically of a few percents, is a necessary consequence of the polycrystalline nature of the materials. The polycrystal undergoing plastic deformation is modeled as a flowing…

We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…

Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…

At temperatures well below their glass transition, the deformation properties of bulk metallic glasses are characterised by a sharp transition from elasticity to plasticity, a reproducible yield stress, and an approximately linear decrease…

Quasi-brittle plastic yielding is a salient feature of well-annealed glassy materials. Here we show that the same behavior is characteristic of perfect crystals after they experience mechanically driven elastic instability leading to…

We consider a generalized version of the Random Energy Model in which the energy of each configuration is given by the sum of $N$ independent contributions ("local energies") with finite variances but otherwise arbitrary statistics. Using…

In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…

Solids subjected to repeated cycles of stress or deformation can fail after several cycles, a phenomenon termed fatigue failure. Although intensely investigated for a wide range of materials owing to its obvious practical importance, a…

We poorly understand the properties of amorphous systems at small length scales, where a continuous elastic description breaks down. This is apparent when one considers their vibrational and transport properties, or the way forces propagate…

The existence of a finite threshold, the yield stress, for the onset of plastic yielding is a universal feature of plasticity. This jamming-unjamming transition is naturally accounted for by the dynamics of a bistable internal state field.…

The mechanical response of solids depends on temperature because the way atoms and molecules respond collectively to deformation is affected at various levels by thermal motion. This is a fundamental problem of solid state science and plays…

Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…