Mechanical disorder of sticky-sphere glasses. I. Effect of attractive interactions

Abstract

Recent literature indicates that attractive interactions between particles of a dense liquid play a secondary role in determining its bulk mechanical properties. Here we show that, in contrast with their apparent unimportance to the bulk mechanics of dense liquids, attractive interactions can have a major effect on macro- and microscopic elastic properties of glassy solids. We study several broadly-applicable dimensionless measures of stability and mechanical disorder in simple computer glasses, in which the relative strength of attractive interactions -- referred to as `glass stickiness' -- can be readily tuned. We show that increasing glass stickiness can result in the decrease of various quantifiers of mechanical disorder, on both macro- and microscopic scales, with a pair of intriguing exceptions to this rule. Interestingly, in some cases strong attractions can lead to a reduction of the number density of soft, quasilocalized modes, by up to an order of magnitude, and to a substantial decrease in their core size, similar to the effects of thermal annealing on elasticity observed in recent works. Contrary to the behavior of canonical glass models, we provide compelling evidence indicating that the stabilization mechanism in our sticky-sphere glasses stems predominantly from the self-organized depletion of interactions featuring large, \emph{negative} stiffnesses. Finally, we establish a fundamental link between macroscopic and microscopic quantifiers of mechanical disorder, which we motivate via scaling arguments. Future research directions are discussed.

22 pages, 19 figures. v2: we use an improved scheme for estimating the sample-to-sample variance of the shear modulus. Figures were updated accordingly

References in corpus (16)

• Jamming at Zero Temperature and Zero Applied Stress: the Epitome of Disorder
• Irreversible reorganization in a supercooled liquid originates from localised soft modes
• The role of local structure in dynamical arrest
• Marginal Stability in Structural, Spin and Electron Glasses
• The Ioffe-Regel criterion and diffusion of vibrations in random lattices
• Excess Vibrational Modes and the Boson Peak in Model Glasses
• Structure and dynamics in glass-formers: predictability at large length scales
• Non-affine response: jammed packings versus spring networks
• Jamming in finite systems: stability, anisotropy, fluctuations and scaling
• Acoustic excitations and elastic heterogeneities in disordered solids
• Dependence of the fragility of a glass former on the softness of interparticle interactions
• Nonlinear modes disentangle glassy and Goldstone modes in structural glasses
• A simple and broadly-applicable definition of shear transformation zones
• Role of attractive forces in the relaxation dynamics of supercooled liquids
• Mechanical disorder of sticky-sphere glasses. II. Thermo-mechanical inannealability
• Extracting the properties of quasilocalized modes in computer glasses: Long-range continuum fields, contour integrals and boundary effects

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Low-energy quasilocalized excitations in structural glasses
• Boson-peak vibrational modes in glasses feature hybridized phononic and quasilocalized excitations
• Unifying description of the vibrational anomalies of amorphous materials
• Mean-field model of interacting quasilocalized excitations in glasses
• The boson peak in the vibrational spectra of glasses
• Mechanical disorder of sticky-sphere glasses. II. Thermo-mechanical inannealability
• Disordered crystals reveal soft quasilocalized glassy excitations
• Microscopic observation of two-level systems in a metallic glass model
• A unified quantifier of mechanical disorder in solids
• Emergence of linear isotropic elasticity in amorphous and polycrystalline materials
• Anomalous linear elasticity of disordered networks
• Variability of mesoscopic mechanical disorder in disordered solids
• Internally-stressed and positionally-disordered minimal complexes yield glasslike nonphononic excitations
• Glassy dynamics of sticky hard spheres beyond the mode-coupling regime
• Scaling regimes and fluctuations of observables in computer glasses approaching the unjamming transition
• Revealing the Geometrical and Vibrational Properties of the Defects Driving the Boson Peak
• Electronic and structural properties of crystalline and amorphous (TaNbHfTiZr)C from first principles
• Elementary processes in dilatational plasticity of glasses
• Does mesoscopic elasticity control viscous slowing down in glassforming liquids?
• Bond-space operator disentangles quasi-localized and phononic modes in structural glasses