Related papers: Vibrational modes identify soft spots in a sheared…
We show that quasi localized low-frequency modes in the vibrational spectrum can be used to construct soft spots, or regions vulnerable to rearrangement, which serve as a universal tool for the identification of flow defects in solids. We…
By considering the low-frequency vibrational modes of amorphous solids, Manning and Liu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 108302 (2011)] showed that a population of "soft spots" can be identified that are intimately related to plasticity at zero…
We investigate correlations between low-frequency vibrational modes and rearrangements in two-dimensional colloidal glasses composed of thermosensitive microgel particles which readily permit variation of sample packing fraction. At each…
Because of the inevitably disordered background, structural defects are not well-defined concepts in amorphous solids. In order to overcome this difficulty, it has been recently proposed that topological defects can be still identified in…
Understanding the vibrational and thermal properties of amorphous solids is one of the most discussed and long-standing issues in condensed matter physics. Recent works have made significant steps towards understanding harmonic vibrational…
We find that the hierarchical organization of the potential energy landscape in a model supercooled liquid can be related to a change in the spatial distribution of soft normal modes. For groups of nearby minima, between which fast…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we show that a simple model of a glassy material exhibits the shear localization phenomenon observed in many complex fluids. At low shear rates, the system separates into a fluidized shear-band and an…
Structural relaxation in hard-sphere colloidal glasses has been studied using confocal microscopy. The motion of individual particles is followed over long time scales to detect the rearranging regions in the system. We have used normal…
We propose a new method to characterize the spatial distribution of particles' vibrations in solids with much lower computational costs compared to the usual normal mode analysis. We excite the specific vibrational mode in a two dimensional…
Vibrational spectra and normal modes of mechanically stable particle packings in three dimensions are analyzed over a range of compressions, from near the jamming transition, where the packings lose their rigidity, to far above it. At high…
Ultra-stable glasses prepared from the physical vapor deposition of organic molecules present a very low density of two-level states, the kind of glass defects that determine their peculiar low temperature thermal properties. Numerical…
Wave localization is ubiquitous in disordered media -- from amorphous materials, where soft-mode localization is closely related to materials failure, to semi-conductors, where Anderson localization leads to metal-insulator transition. Our…
The effect of periodic shear on strain localization in disordered solids is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a binary mixture of one million atoms annealed to a low temperature with different cooling rates and…
Although jammed packings of soft spheres exist in potential energy landscapes with a vast number of minima, when subjected to cyclic shear they may revisit the same configurations repeatedly. Simple hysteretic spin models, in which particle…
We develop a new method to isolate localized defects from extended vibrational modes in disordered solids. This method augments particle interactions with an artificial potential that acts as a high-pass filter: it preserves small-scale…
The topological nature of the disorder of glasses and supercooled liquids strongly affects their high-frequency dynamics. In order to understand its main features, we analytically studied a simple topologically disordered model, where the…
We numerically study the evolution of the vibrational density of states $D(\omega)$ of zero-temperature glasses when their kinetic stability is varied over an extremely broad range, ranging from poorly annealed glasses obtained by…
In glasses, atomic disorder combined with atomic connectivity makes understanding of the nature of the vibrations much more complex than in crystals or molecules. With a simple model, however, it is possible to show how disorder generates…
The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle's…
The deformation of disordered solids relies on swift and localised rearrangements of particles. The inspection of soft vibrational modes can help predict the locations of these rearrangements, while the strain that they actually…