Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is examined via vulcanization theory. The spatial heterogeneity in the \emph{structure} of soft random solids is a result of the fluctuations locked-in at their synthesis, which also brings heterogeneity in their \emph{elastic properties}. Vulcanization theory studies semi-microscopic models of random-solid-forming systems, and applies replica field theory to deal with their quenched disorder and thermal fluctuations. The elastic deformations of soft random solids are argued to be described by the Goldstone sector of fluctuations contained in vulcanization theory, associated with a subtle form of spontaneous symmetry breaking that is associated with the liquid-to-random-solid transition. The resulting free energy of this Goldstone sector can be reinterpreted as arising from a phenomenological description of an elastic medium with quenched disorder. Through this comparison, we arrive at the statistics of the quenched disorder of the elasticity of soft random solids, in terms of residual stress and Lamé-coefficient fields. In particular, there are large residual stresses in the equilibrium reference state, and the disorder correlators involving the residual stress are found to be long-ranged and governed by a universal parameter that also gives the mean shear modulus.
The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the response of such athermal solids are governed by local conditions of mechanical equilibrium, i.e., force and torque balance of its constituents. Here we show that these constraints have the mathematical structure of a generalized electromagnetism, where the electrostatic limit successfully captures the anisotropic elasticity of amorphous solids. The emergence of …
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations. For amorphous solids the situation is instead less clear, and the microscopic understanding of the response to deformation and stress is a very active research topic. Several studies have revealed that even in the elastic regime the response is very jerky at low temperature, resembling very much the one of disordered magnetic materials. Here we show that in…
Prestress in amorphous solids bears the memory of their formation, and plays a profound role in their mechanical properties, from stiffening or softening elastic moduli to shifting frequencies of vibrational modes, as well as directing yielding and solidification in the nonlinear regime. Here we develop a set of mathematical tools to investigate elasticity of prestressed discrete networks, which disentangles the effects from disorder in configuration and disorder in prestress. Applying these methods to prestressed triangular lattices and a computational model of amorphous solids, we demonstrat…
Amorphous solids appear to react elastically to small external strains, but in contrast to ideal elastic media, plastic responses abound immediately, at any value of the strain. Such plastic responses are quasi-localized in nature, with the ``cheapest" one being a quadrupolar source. The existence of such plastic responses results in {\em screened elasticity} in which strains and stresses can either quantitatively or qualitatively differ from the un-screened theory, depending on the specific screening mechanism. Here we offer a theory of such screening effects by plastic quadrupoles, dipoles a…
It is known by now that amorphous solids at zero temperature do not possess a nonlinear elasticity theory: besides the shear modulus which exists, all the higher order coefficients do not exist in the thermodynamic limit. Here we show that the same phenomenon persists up to temperatures comparable to the glass transition. The zero temperature mechanism due to the prevalence of dangerous plastic modes of the Hessian matrix is replaced by anomalous stress fluctuations that lead to the divergence of the variances of the higher order elastic coefficients. The conclusion is that in amorphous solids…
Recent progress in studying the physics of amorphous solids has revealed that mechanical strains can be strongly screened by the formation of plastic events that are typically quadrupolar in nature. The theory stipulated that gradients in the density of the quadrupoles act as emergent dipole sources, leading to strong screening and to qualitative changes in the mechanical response, as seen for example in the displacement field. In this Letter we firstly offer direct measurements of the dipole field, independently of any theoretical assumptions, and secondly we demonstrate detailed agreement wi…
The damping or attenuation coefficient of sound waves in solids due to impurities scales with the wavevector to the fourth power, also known as Rayleigh scattering. In amorphous solids, Rayleigh scattering may be enhanced by a logarithmic factor although computer simulations offer conflicting conclusions regarding this enhancement and its microscopic origin. We present a tensorial replica field-theoretic derivation based on heterogeneous or fluctuating elasticity (HE), which shows that long-range (power-law) spatial correlations of the elastic constants, is the origin of the logarithmic enhanc…
The shear response of soft solids can be modeled with linear elasticity, provided the forcing is slow and weak. Both of these approximations must break down when the material loses rigidity, such as in foams and emulsions at their (un)jamming point -- suggesting that the window of linear elastic response near jamming is exceedingly narrow. Yet precisely when and how this breakdown occurs remains unclear. To answer these questions, we perform computer simulations of stress relaxation and shear startup experiments in athermal soft sphere packings, the canonical model for jamming. By systematical…
The theory of mechanical response and stress transmission in disordered, jammed solids poses several open questions of how non-periodic networks -- apparently indistinguishable from a snapshot of a fluid -- sustain shear. We present a stress-only theory of emergent elasticity for a non-thermal amorphous assembly of grains in a jammed solid, where each grain is subjected to mechanical constraints of force and torque balance. These grain-level constraints lead to the Gauss's law of an emergent $U(1)$ tensor electromagnetism, which then accounts for the mechanical response of such solids. This fo…
The holographic duality has proven successful in linking seemingly unrelated problems in physics.Recently, intriguing correspondences between the physics of soft matter and gravity are emerging,including strong similarities between the rheology of amorphous solids, effective field theories for elasticity and the physics of black holes. However, direct comparisons between theoretical predictions and experimental/simulation observations remain limited. Here, we study the effects of non-linear elasticity on the mechanical and thermodynamic properties of amorphous materials responding to shear, us…
The equilibrium amorphous solid state -- formed, e.g., by adequately randomly crosslinking the constituents of a macromolecular fluid -- is a heterogeneous state characterized by a universal distribution of particle localization lengths. Near to the crosslink-density-controlled continuous amorphous-solidification transition, this distribution obeys a scaling form: it has a single peak at a lengthscale that diverges (along with the width of the distribution) as the transition is approached. The modulus controlling macroscale elastic shear deformations of the amorphous solid does not depend on t…
Starting from a microscopic model of randomly cross-linked particles with quenched disorder, we calculate the Laudau-Wilson free energy S for arbitrary cross-link densities. Considering pure shear deformations, S takes the form of the elastic energy of an isotropic amorphous solid state, from which the shear modulus can be identified. It is found to be an universal quantity, not depending on any microscopic length-scales of the model.
The vibrational anomalies of glasses, in particular the boson peak, are addressed from the standpoint of heterogeneous elasticity, namely the spatial fluctuations of elastic constants caused by the structural disorder of the amorphous materials. In the first part of this review article a mathematical analogy between diffusive motion in a disordered environment and a scalar simplification of vibrational motion under the same condition is emploited. We demonstrate that the disorder-induced long-time tails of diffusion correspond to the Rayleigh scattering law in the vibrational system and that t…
Paradigmatic model systems, which are used to study the mechanical response of matter, are random networks of point-atoms, random sphere packings, or simple crystal lattices, all of these models assume central-force interactions between particles/atoms. Each of these models differs in the spatial arrangement and the correlations among particles. In turn, this is reflected in the widely different behaviours of the shear (G) and compression (K) elastic moduli. The relation between the macroscopic elasticity as encoded in G, K and their ratio, and the microscopic lattice structure/order, is not u…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently, however, it was shown that introducing any finite amount of attraction between particles changes the universality class of the transition. The properties of this new ``sticky jamming'' class remain almost entirely unexplored. We use molecular dynamics simulations and scaling analysis to determine the shear modulus, bulk modulus, and coordination of marginal solids…
Amorphous solids, such as glasses, have complex responses to deformations, with significant consequences in material design and applications. In this respect two intertwined aspects are important: stability and reversibility. It is crucial to understand on the one hand how a glass may become unstable due to increased plasticity under shear deformations; on the other hand, to what extent the response is reversible, meaning how much a system is able to recover the original configuration once the perturbation is released. Here we focus on assemblies of hard spheres as the simplest model of amorph…
A theory of vibrational excitations based on power-law spatial correlations in the elastic constants (or equivalently in the internal stress) is derived, in order to determine the vibrational density of states $D(ω)$ of disordered solids. The results provide the first prediction of a boson peak in amorphous materials where spatial correlations in the internal stresses (or elastic constants) are of power-law form, as is often the case in experimental systems, leading to logarithmic enhancement of (Rayleigh) phonon attenuation. A logarithmic correction of the form $\sim -ω^{2}\lnω$ is predicted …
Further testing the validity of generalized heterogeneous-elasticity theory for low-frequency excitations in structural glasses
Universität Mainz（美因茨大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Universita’ di Roma “La Sapienza”（罗马第一大学）；Univ. of Oxford（牛津大学）；NOMATEN Centre of Excellence, National Center for Nuclear Research（国家核研究中心卓越中心）；Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学）
We investigate the high-frequency behavior of the density of vibrational states in three-dimensional elasticity theory with spatially fluctuating elastic moduli. At frequencies well above the mobility edge, instanton solutions yield an exponentially decaying density of states. The instanton solutions describe excitations, which become localized due to the disorder-induced fluctuations, which lower the sound velocity in a finite region compared to its average value. The exponentially decaying density of states (known in electronic systems as the Lifshitz tail) is governed by the statistics of a…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence of a nonzero static shear modulus. In this article, a semi-microscopic statistical mechanical theory of the elastic properties of the amorphous solid state is developed. This theory takes into account both quenched disorder and thermal fluctuations, and allows for the direct computation of the free energy change of the sample due to a given macroscopic shea…
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving free boundary. In this Letter we focus on failure via a cavitation instability in a radially-symmetric stressed material, set up the free boundary dynamics taking both elasticity and visco-plasticity into account, using the recently proposed athermal Shear Transformation Zone theory. We demonstrate the existence (in amorphous systems) of fast cavitation mod…
The modeling of the elastic properties of disordered or nanoscale solids requires the foundations of the theory of elasticity to be revisited, as one explores scales at which this theory may no longer hold. The only cases for which microscopically based derivations of elasticity are documented are (nearly) uniformly strained lattices. A microscopic approach to elasticity is proposed. As a first step, microscopically exact expressions for the displacement, strain and stress fields are derived. Conditions under which linear elastic constitutive relations hold are studied theoretically and numeri…
