On the density of shear transformation zones in amorphous solids

Jie Lin 1 Alaa Saade 1 Edan Lerner 1 Alberto Rosso 2 Matthieu Wyart 1

Europhysics Letters, EDP Science, 2014, 105, pp.26003

We study the stability of amorphous solids, focusing on the distribution P(x) of the local stress increase x that would lead to an instability. We argue that this distribution is singular P(x)x^{\theta}, where the exponent {\theta} is non-zero if the elastic interaction between rearranging regions is non-monotonic, and increases with the interaction range. For a class of finite dimensional models we show that stability implies a lower bound on {\theta}, which is found to lie near saturation. For quadrupolar interactions these models yield {\theta} ~ 0.6 for d=2 and \theta ~ 0.4 in d=3 where d is the spatial dimension, accurately capturing previously unresolved observations in atomistic models, both in quasi-static flow and after a fast quench.

  • 1. New York University, Center for Soft Matter Research
  • 2. LPTMS – Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques
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