Rare events and disorder control the brittle yielding of well-annealed amorphous solids

Abstract

We use atomistic computer simulations to provide a microscopic description of the brittle failure of amorphous materials, and we assess the role of rare events and quenched disorder. We argue that brittle yielding originates at rare soft regions, similarly to Griffiths effects in disordered systems. We numerically demonstrate how localized plastic events in such soft regions trigger macroscopic failure via the propagation of a shear band. This physical picture, which no longer holds in poorly annealed ductile materials, allows us to discuss the role of finite size effects in brittle yielding and reinforces the similarities between yielding and other disorder-controlled nonequilibrium phase transitions.

12 pages, 10 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Modern computational studies of the glass transition
• Ductile-to-brittle transition and yielding in soft amorphous materials: perspectives and open questions
• Yielding, shear banding and brittle failure of amorphous materials
• Yielding and plasticity in amorphous solids
• Ductile and brittle yielding of athermal amorphous solids: a mean-field paradigm beyond the random field Ising model
• Swap Monte Carlo for diatomic molecules
• Athermal creep deformation of ultrastable amorphous solids
• Computational Methods toward Ultrastable Glasses