Metastability as a mechanism for yielding in amorphous solids under cyclic shear

Abstract

We consider the yielding behavior of amorphous solids under cyclic shear deformation and show that it can be mapped into a random walk in a confining potential with an absorbing boundary. The resulting dynamics is governed by the first passage time into the absorbing state and suffices to capture the essential qualitative features recently observed in atomistic simulations of amorphous solids. Our results provide insight into the mechanism underlying yielding and its robustness. When the possibility of activated escape from absorbing states is added, it leads to a unique determination of a threshold energy and yield strain, suggesting thereby an appealing approach to understanding fatigue failure.

Revised version, 6 pages, 2 figures and Supplemental Material as ancillary file

References in corpus (3)

• Evaluation of the "disorder temperature" and "free volume" formalisms via simulations of shear banding in amorphous solids
• Shear yielding and shear jamming of dense hard sphere glasses
• Cyclic annealing as an iterated random map

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• Mean field theory of yielding under oscillatory shear
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• Yielding and memory in a driven mean-field model of glasses