Related papers: On the geometry of topological defects in glasses
The plastic deformation of crystalline materials can be understood by considering their structural defects such as disclinations and dislocations. Although glasses are also solids, their structure resembles closely the one of a liquid and…
Topological defects are singularities within a field that cannot be removed by continuous transformations. The definition of these irregularities requires an ordered reference configuration, calling into question whether they exist in…
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…
Mixing theoretical topological structures with cutting-edge simulation methods, a recent study in Nature Communications has finally confirmed the existence of topological defects in glasses and their crucial role for plasticity.
We use a local projectional analysis method to investigate the effect of topological disorder on the vibrational dynamics in a model glass simulated by molecular dynamics. Evidence is presented that the vibrational eigenmodes in the glass…
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,…
The deformation mechanism in amorphous solids subjected to external shear remains poorly understood because of the absence of well-defined topological defects mediating the plastic deformation. The notion of soft spots has emerged as a…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…
The microscopic mechanism by which amorphous solids yield plastically under an externally applied stress or deformation has remained elusive in spite of enormous research activity in recent years. Most approaches have attempted to identify…
The underlying structural disorder renders the concept of topological defects in amorphous solids difficult to apply and hinders a first-principle identification of the microscopic carriers of plasticity and of the regions more prone to…
It was recently shown that vortex-like topological defects with negative winding number in the vibrational modes of a two-dimensional glass under quasistatic shear correlate strongly with plastic events, offering a promising route to…
Glasses have a large excess of low-frequency vibrational modes in comparison with crystalline solids. We show that such a feature is a necessary consequence of the geometry generic to weakly connected solids. In particular, we analyze the…
The glassy dynamics of dense active matter have recently become a topic of interest due to their importance in biological processes such as wound healing and tissue development. However, while the liquid-state properties of dense active…
All liquids are topologically disordered materials; however, the degree of disorder can vary as a result of internal fluctuations in structure and topology. These fluctuations depend on both the composition and temperature of the system.…
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…
There are two prominent applications of the mathematical concept of topology to the physics of materials: band topology, which classifies different topological insulators and semimetals, and topological defects that represent immutable…
Motivated by results of the topological theory of glasses accounting for geometric frustration, we develop the simplest possible continuum mechanical model of defect dynamics in metallic glasses that accounts for topological, energetic, and…
Topological defects (TDs) are crucial for understanding important physical properties of crystalline materials including mechanical failure, ion transport, and two-dimensional melting. This concept has not translated to disordered materials…
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…
In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…