Related papers: Mapping out the glassy landscape of a mesoscopic e…
The local and global dynamics of a sheared granular medium are studied in a model experiment as a function of several macroscopic parameters. We observe that by changing the shear rate or the loading stiffness, the system crackles, with…
Glasses are mechanically rigid, still undergo structural relaxation which changes their properties and affects potential technological applications. Understanding the underlying physical processes is a problem of broad theoretical and…
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…
Experimentally resolving atomic-scale structural changes of a deformed glass remains challenging owing to the disordered nature of glass structure. Here, we show that the structural anisotropy emerges as a general hallmark for different…
To study the cooling behavior and the glass transition of polymer melts in bulk and with free surfaces a coarse-grained weakly semi-flexible polymer model is developed. Based on a standard bead spring model with purely repulsive…
A phenomenon recently coined as ``overaging'' implies a slowdown in the collective (slow) relaxation modes of a glass when a transient shear strain is imposed. We are able to reproduce this behavior in simulations of a supercooled polymer…
Amorphous solids are ubiquitous among natural and man-made materials. Often used as structural materials for their attractive mechanical properties, their utility depends critically on their response to applied stresses. Processes…
The description of activated relaxation of glassy systems in the multidimensional configurational space is a long-standing open problem. We develop a phenomenological description of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a model with a rough…
Recent progresses in the description of glassy relaxation and ageing are reviewed for the wide class of network-forming materials such as $GeO_2$, Ge$_x$Se$_{1-x}$, silicates (SiO$_2$-Na$_2$O) or borates (B$_2$O$_3$-Li$_2$O), all of them…
The shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theory of plastic deformation in glass-forming materials is reformulated in light of recent progress in understanding the roles played the effective disorder temperature and entropy flow in nonequilibrium…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
Glass transitions are widely observed in various types of soft matter systems. However, the physical mechanism of these transitions remains {elusive}, despite years of ambitious research. In particular, an important unanswered question is…
We report computer simulations of oscillatory athermal quasi-static shear deformation of dense amorphous samples of a three dimensional model glass former. A dynamical transition is observed as the amplitude of the deformation is varied:…
Yield stress fluids display complex dynamics, in particular when driven into the transient regime between the solid and the flowing state. Inspired by creep experiments on dense amorphous materials, we implement mesocale elasto-plastic…
In this paper we focus on the mechanical properties of oligomeric glasses (waxes), employing a microscopic model that provides, via numerical simulations, information about the shear modulus of such materials, the failure mechanism via…
It is well established that physical aging of amorphous solids is governed by a marked change in dynamical properties as the material becomes older. Conversely, structural properties such as the radial distribution function exhibit only a…
The correlations of the free-energy landscape of mean-field spin glasses at different temperatures are investigated, concentrating on models with a first order freezing transition. Using a ``potential function'' we follow the metastable…
We build a minimal, mean-field, model of plasticity of amorphous solids, based upon a phenomenology of dissipative events derived, in a preceding paper [A. Lemaitre, C. Caroli, arXiv:0705.0823] from extensive molecular simulations. It…
Understanding glasses is considered to be one of the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. A theoretical approach to unravel their universal properties is to consider the validity of equilibrium concepts such as temperature and…
Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among…