Related papers: Scale-dependent elasticity as a probe of universal…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic…
We develop an energy-landscape based elasto-plastic model to understand the behaviour of amorphous solids under uniform and cyclic shear. Amorphous solids are modeled as being composed of mesoscopic sub-volumes, each of which may occupy…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles. Experiments have shown that more heterogeneous microstructures exhibit up to one order of magnitude higher…
When an amorphous solid is deformed homogeneously, the response exhibits heterogeneous plastic instabilities with localized cooperative rearrangement of cluster of particles. The heterogeneous behavior plays an important role in deciding…
Candidates for random network media include, e.g., systems consisting of long, flexible macromolecules cross-linked (i.e., permanently bonded) together at random to form the network. Owing to the random architecture, the characteristics of…
Plastic deformation of heterogeneous solid structures is often characterized by random intermittent local plastic events. On the mesoscale this feature can be represented by a spatially fluctuating local yield threshold. Here we study the…
The deformation and flow of disordered solids, such as metallic glasses and concentrated emulsions, involves swift localized rearrangements of particles that induce a long-range deformation field. To describe these heterogeneous processes,…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
The strain load $\Delta\gamma$ that triggers consecutive avalanches is a key observable in the slow deformation of amorphous solids. Its temporally averaged value $\langle \Delta\gamma \rangle$ displays a non-trivial system-size dependence…
Supercooled liquids exhibit complicated dynamical behaviors: At the microscopic level, the dynamics is heterogeneous spatially, known as dynamic heterogeneity. At the macroscopic level, the shear viscosity $\eta$ decreases as shear rate…
A number of current theories of plasticity in amorphous solids assume at their basis that plastic deformations are spatially localized. We present in this paper a series of numerical experiments to test the degree of locality of plastic…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is examined via vulcanization theory. The spatial heterogeneity in the \emph{structure} of soft random solids is a result of the fluctuations locked-in at their…
Experimental studies of the variation of the mean square displacement (MSD) of a particle in a confined colloid suspension that exhibits density variations on the scale length of the particle diameter are not in agreement with the…
We investigate the emergence of isotropic linear elasticity in amorphous and polycrystalline solids, via extensive numerical simulations. We show that the elastic properties are correlated over a finite length scale $\xi_E$, so that the…
This Letter is motivated by some recent experiments on pan-cake shaped nano-samples of metallic glass that indicate a decline in the measured shear modulus upon decreasing the sample radius. Similar measurements on crystalline samples of…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
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…
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…