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 understood. We provide a quantitative analytical connection between the local orientational order and the elasticity in model amorphous solids with different internal microstructure, focusing on the two opposite limits of packings (strong excluded-volume) and networks (no excluded-volume). The theory predicts that, in packings, the local orientational order due to excluded-volume causes less nonaffinity (less softness or larger stiffness) under compression than under shear. This leads to lower values of G/K, a well-documented phenomenon which was lacking a microscopic explanation. The theory also provides an excellent one-parameter description of the elasticity of compressed emulsions in comparison with experimental data over a broad range of packing fractions.
We study the effects of bond disorder on triangular and honeycomb lattices where each spring has a probability p to be odd elastic. Using an effective medium theory and numerical simulations, we uncover the behavior of odd moduli in the presence of disorder, which we interpret as a crossover between the affine response of the passive elastic backbone, and a rigidity percolation transition in the odd elastic components. Though oddness is generally robust against disorder even at low p, we find that fine-tuned features of an odd elastic honeycomb lattice are not robust against disorder.
In this letter, we develop a framework to study the mechanical response of athermal amorphous solids via a coupling of mesoscale and microscopic models. Using measurements of coarse grained quantities from simulations of dense disordered particulate systems, we present a coherent elasto-plastic model approach for deformation and flow of yield stress materials. For a given set of parameters, this model allows to match consistently transient and steady state features of driven disordered systems under both applied shear-rate and creep protocols.
We analyze low-frequency vibrational modes in a two-dimensional, zero-temperature, quasistatically sheared model glass to identify a population of structural "soft spots" where particle rearrangements are initiated. The population of spots evolves slowly compared to the interval between particle rearrangements and the soft spots are structurally different from the rest of the system. Our results suggest that disordered solids flow via localized rearrangements that tend to occur at soft spots, which are analogous to dislocations in crystalline solids.
Recently there has been a surge in interest in using video-microscopy techniques to infer the local mechanical properties of disordered solids. One common approach is to minimize the difference between particle vibrational displacements in a local coarse-graining volume and the displacements that would result from a best-fit affine deformation. Effective moduli are then be inferred under the assumption that the components of this best-fit affine deformation tensor have a Boltzmann distribution. In this paper, we combine theoretical arguments with experimental and simulation data to demonstrate…
In this work we develop a theoretical framework for the localization of flow in the steadily flowing regime of sheared disordered solids with inertial dynamics on a microscopic scale. To this aim we perform rheology studies at fixed shear rate on a 3D model of dense disordered solid. Our particle based simulations reveal the existence of heterogeneous shear-profiles in the stationary flow under homogeneous driving conditions. To rationalize this result, we propose a continuum model that couples the dynamics of the local flow to the evolution of a kinetic temperature field. A linear stability a…
Configurations of supercooled liquids residing in their local potential minimum (i.e. in their inherent structure, IS) were found to support a non-zero shear stress. This IS stress was attributed to the constraint to the energy minimization imposed by boundary conditions, which keep size and shape of the simulation cell fixed. In this paper we further investigate the influence of these boundary conditions on the IS stress. We investigate its importance for the computation of the low frequency shear modulus of a glass obtaining a consistent picture for the low- and high frequency shear moduli o…
The effect of alternating shear orientation during cyclic loading on the relaxation dynamics in disordered solids is examined using molecular dynamics simulations. The model glass was initially prepared by rapid cooling from the liquid state and then subjected to cyclic shear along a single plane or periodically alternated in two or three dimensions. We showed that with increasing strain amplitude in the elastic range, the system is relocated to deeper energy minima. Remarkably, it was found that each additional alternation of the shear orientation in the deformation protocol brings the glass …
Disordered solids exhibit unusual properties of their vibrational states and thermal conductivities. Recent progresses have well established the concept of "elastic heterogeneity", i.e., disordered materials show spatially inhomogeneous elastic moduli. In this study, by using molecular-dynamics simulations, we gradually introduce "disorder" into a numerical system to control its modulus heterogeneity. The system starts from a perfect crystalline state, progressively transforms into an increasingly disordered crystalline state, and finally undergoes structural amorphisation. We monitor independ…
Isostatic networks are minimally rigid and therefore have, generically, nonzero elastic moduli. Regular isostatic networks have finite moduli in the limit of large sizes. However, numerical simulations show that all elastic moduli of geometrically disordered isostatic networks go to zero with system size. This holds true for positional as well as for topological disorder. In most cases, elastic moduli decrease as inverse power-laws of system size. On directed isostatic networks, however, of which the square and cubic lattices are particular cases, the decrease of the moduli is exponential with…
It has recently been shown that in a broad class of disordered systems oscillatory shear training can embed memories of specific shear protocols in relevant physical parameters such as the yield strain. These shear protocols can be used to change the physical properties of the system and memories of the protocol can later be "read" out. Here we investigate shear training memories in colloidal gels, which include an attractive interaction and network structure, and discover that such systems can support memories both along and orthogonal to the training flow direction. We use oscillatory shear …
Particle tracking and displacement covariance matrix techniques are employed to investigate the phonon dispersion relations of two-dimensional colloidal glasses composed of soft, thermoresponsive microgel particles whose temperature-sensitive size permits \textit{in situ} variation of particle packing fraction. Bulk, $B$, and shear, $G$, moduli of the colloidal glasses are extracted from the dispersion relations as a function of packing fraction, and variation of the ratio $G/B$ with packing fraction is found to agree quantitatively with predictions for jammed packings of frictional soft parti…
Disordered solids respond to quasistatic shear with intermittent avalanches of plastic activity, an example of the crackling noise observed in many nonequilibrium critical systems. The temporal power spectrum of activity within disordered solids consists of three distinct domains: a novel power-law rise with frequency at low frequencies indicating anticorrelation, white-noise at intermediate frequencies, and a power-law decay at high frequencies. As the strain rate increases, the white-noise regime shrinks and ultimately disappears as the finite strain rate restricts the maximum size of an ava…
We describe a high-resolution, high-bandwidth technique for determining the local viscoelasticity of soft materials such as polymer gels. Loss and storage shear moduli are determined from the power spectra of thermal fluctuations of embedded micron-sized probe particles, observed with an interferometric microscope. This provides a passive, small-amplitude measurement of rheological properties over a much broader frequency range than previously accessible to microrheology. We study both F-actin biopolymer solutions and polyacrylamide (PAAm) gels, as model semiflexible and flexible systems, resp…
We investigate the linear elastic response of amorphous solids to a shear strain at zero temperature. We find that the response is characterized by at least two distinct shear moduli. The first one, $μ_{\rm ZFC}$, is associated with the linear response of a single energy minimum. The second, $μ_{\rm FC}$, is related to sampling, through plastic events, an ensemble of distinct energy minima. We provide examples of protocols that allow one to measure both shear moduli. In agreement with a theoretical prediction based on the exact solution in infinite spatial dimensions, the ratio $μ_{\rm FC}/μ_{…
In soft amorphous materials, shear cessation after large shear deformation leads to structures having residual shear stress. The origin of these states and the distribution of the local shear stresses within the material is not well understood, despite its importance for the change in material properties and consequent applications. In this work, we use molecular dynamics simulations of a model dense non-Brownian soft amorphous material to probe the non-trivial relaxation process towards a residual stress state. We find that, similar to thermal glasses, an increase in shear rate prior to the s…
The relation between elasticity and yielding is investigated in a model polymer solid by Molecular-Dynamics simulations. By changing the bending stiffness of the chain and the bond length, semicrystalline and disordered glassy polymers - both with bond disorder - as well as nematic glassy polymers with bond ordering are obtained. It is found that in systems with bond disorder the ratio Ty/G between the shear yield strength Ty and the shear modulus G is close to the universal value of the atomic metallic glasses. The increase of the local nematic order in glasses leads to the increase of the sh…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic heterogeneities in athermal amorphous solids, composed of isotropic, static, sphere packings, near the jamming transition. We employ techniques, based on linear response methods, that are amenable to experimentation. We find that the local elastic moduli are randomly distributed in space and are described by Gaussian probability distributions, thereby lacking any sign…
Passive microrheology typically deduces shear elastic loss and storage moduli from displacement time series or mean-squared displacement (MSD) of thermally fluctuating probe particles in equilibrium materials. Common data analysis methods use either Kramers-Kronig (KK) transformations or functional fitting to calculate frequency-dependent loss and storage moduli. We propose a new analysis method for passive microrheology that avoids the limitations of both of these approaches. In this method, we determine both real and imaginary components of the complex, frequency-dependent response function …
A fundamental challenge for disordered solids is predicting macroscopic yield from the microscopic arrangements of constituent particles. Yield is accompanied by a sudden and large increase in energy dissipation due to the onset of plastic rearrangements. This suggests that one path to understanding bulk rheology is to map particle configurations to their mode of deformation. Here, we perform laboratory experiments and numerical simulations that are designed to do just that: 2D dense colloidal systems are subjected to oscillatory shear, and particle trajectories and bulk rheology are measured.…
Rate-effects in sheared disordered solids are studied using molecular dynamics simulations of binary Lennard-Jones glasses in two and three dimensions. In the quasistatic (QS) regime, systems exhibit critical behavior: the magnitudes of avalanches are power-law distributed with a maximum cutoff that diverges with increasing system size $L$. With increasing rate, systems move away from the critical yielding point and the average flow stress rises as a power of the strain rate with exponent $1/β$, the Herschel-Bulkley exponent. Finite-size scaling collapses of the stress are used to measure $β$ …
The shear flow of two dimensional foams is probed as a function of shear rate and disorder. Disordered foams exhibit strongly rate dependent velocity profiles, whereas ordered foams show rate independence. Both behaviors are captured quantitatively in a simple model based on the balance of the time-averaged drag forces in the foam, which are found to exhibit power-law scaling with the foam velocity and strain rate. Disorder modifies the scaling of the averaged inter-bubble drag forces, which in turn causes the observed rate dependence in disordered foams.
We study the finite-shear-rate rheology of disordered solids by means of molecular dynamics simulations in two dimensions. By systematically varying the damping magnitude $ζ$ in the low-temperature limit, we identify two well defined flow regimes, separated by a thin (temperature-dependent) crossover region. In the overdamped regime, the athermal rheology is governed by the competition between elastic forces and viscous forces, whose ratio gives the Weissenberg number $Wi= ζ\dotγ$ (up to elastic parameters); the macroscopic stress $Σ$ follows the frequently encountered Herschel-Bulkley law $Σ=…
A minimal model for studying the mechanical properties of amorphous solids is a disordered network of point masses connected by unbreakable springs. At a critical value of its mean connectivity, such a network becomes fragile: it undergoes a rigidity transition signaled by a vanishing shear modulus and transverse sound speed. We investigate analytically and numerically the linear and non-linear visco-elastic response of these fragile solids by probing how shear fronts propagate through them. Our approach, that we tentatively label shear front rheology, provides an alternative route to standard…
The nature of yield in amorphous materials under stress has yet to be fully elucidated. In particular, understanding how microscopic rearrangement gives rise to macroscopic structural and rheological signatures in disordered systems is vital for the prediction and characterization of yield and for the study of how memory is stored in disordered materials. Here, we investigate the evolution of local structural homogeneity on an individual particle level in amorphous jammed two-dimensional systems under oscillatory shear, and relate this evolution to rearrangement, memory, and macroscale rheolog…
This study proposes a coherent scenario of the formation of permanent shear bands in the flow of yield stress materials. It is a well accepted point of view that flow in disordered media is occurring via local plastic events, corresponding to small size rearrangements, that yield a long range stress redistribution over the system. Within a minimalistic mesoscopic model that incorporates these local dynamics, we study the spatial organisation of the local plastic events. The most important parameter in this study is the typical restructuring time needed to regain the original structure after a …
The time evolution and spatial correlations of nonaffine displacements in deformed amorphous solids are investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. The three-dimensional model glass is represented via the binary mixture, which is slowly annealed well below the glass transition temperature and then sheared at a constant strain rate. It is shown that with increasing strain, the typical size of clusters of atoms with large nonaffine displacements increases, and these clusters remain spatially homogeneously distributed, until the yielding point when mobile atoms become localized within a sy…
We probe the flow of two dimensional foams, consisting of a monolayer of bubbles sandwiched between a liquid bath and glass plate, as a function of driving rate, packing fraction and degree of disorder. First, we find that bidisperse, disordered foams exhibit strongly rate dependent and inhomogeneous (shear banded) velocity profiles, while monodisperse, ordered foams are also shear banded, but essentially rate independent. Second, we introduce a simple model based on balancing the averaged drag forces between the bubbles and the top plate and the averaged bubble-bubble drag forces. This model …
We consider a random aggregate of identical frictionless elastic spheres that has first been subjected to an isotropic compression and then sheared. We assume that the average strain provides a good description of how stress is built up in the initial isotropic compression. However, when calculating the increment in the displacement between a typical pair of contaction particles due to the shearing, we employ force equilibrium for the particles of the pair, assuming that the average strain provides a good approximation for their interactions with their neighbors. The incorporation of these add…
The surface stability of two interacting (for example, by van der Waals forces) incompressible thin films, one bonded to a substrate and the other to a contactor, is studied extending the work of Shenoy and Sharma, Physical Review Letters 18, 119--122 (2001). The analysis indicates that the wavelength of the instability depends strongly on the shear moduli and thicknesses of the films but not on the nature and magnitude of the interaction. When the films have equal shear moduli, the wavelength of the instability has an intermediate value between the wavelengths of the instabilities had each of…
We study the rheological response at low temperature of a sheared model disordered material as a function of the bond rigidity. We find that the flow curves follow a Herschel-Bulkley law, whatever is the bond rigidity, with an exponent close to 0.5. Interestingly, the apparent viscosity can be related to a single relevant time scale $t_{rel}$, suggesting a strong connection between the local dynamics and the global mechanical behaviour. We propose a model based on the competition between the nucleation and the avalanche-like propagation of spatial strain heterogeneities. This model can explain…
Molecular dynamics simulations with varying damping are used to examine the effects of inertia and spatial dimension on sheared disordered solids in the athermal, quasistatic limit. In all cases the distribution of avalanche sizes follows a power law over at least three orders of magnitude in dissipated energy or stress drop. Scaling exponents are determined using finite-size scaling for systems with thousands to millions of particles. Three distinct universality classes are identified corresponding to overdamped and underdamped limits, as well as a crossover damping that separates the two reg…
When a disordered solid is sheared, yielding is followed by the onset of intermittent response that is characterized by slip in local regions usually labeled shear-transformation zones (STZ). Such intermittent response resembles the behavior of earthquakes or contact depinning, where a well-defined landscape of pinning disorder prohibits the deformation of an elastic medium. Nevertheless, a disordered solid is evidently different in that pinning barriers of particles are due to neighbors that are also subject to motion. Microscopic yielding leads to destruction of the local microstructure and …
It is widely assumed that disordered auxetic structures (i.e. structures with a negative Poisson's ratio) must contain re-entrant polygons in $2$D and re-entrant polyhedra in $3$D. Here we show how to design disordered networks in $2$D with only convex polygons. The design principles used allow for any Poisson ratio $-1 < ν< 1/3$ to be obtained with a prescriptive algorithm. By starting from a Delaunay triangulation with a mean coordination $<z> \simeq 6$ and $ν\simeq 0.33$ and removing those edges that decrease the shear modulus by the least without creating any re-entrant polygons, the syste…
We propose a method to predict the value of the external strain where a generic amorphous solid will fail by a plastic response (i.e. an irreversible deformation), solely on the basis of measurements of the nonlinear elastic moduli. While usually considered fundamentally different, with the elastic properties describing reversible phenomena and plastic failure epitomizing irreversible behavior, we show that the knowledge of some nonlinear elastic moduli is enough to predict where plasticity sets in.
In crystals, molecules thermally vibrate around the periodic lattice sites. Vibrational motions are well understood in terms of phonons, which carry heat and control heat transport. The situation is notably different in disordered solids, where vibrational excitations are not phonons and can be even localized. Recent numerical work has established the concept of elastic heterogeneity: disordered solids show inhomogeneous local mechanical response. Clearly, the heterogeneous nature of elastic properties strongly influences vibrational and thermal properties, and it is expected to be the origin …
In a recent work, Wyss, {\it et.al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett., {\bf 98}, 238303 (2007)] have noted a property of `soft solids' under oscillatory shear, the so-called strain-rate frequency superposition (SRFS). We extend this study to the case of soft solids under large-amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS). We show results from LAOS studies in a monodisperse hydrogel suspension, an aqueous gel, and a biopolymer suspension, and show that constant strain-rate frequency sweep measurements with soft solids can be superimposed onto master curves for higher harmonic moduli, with the {\it same} shift factors a…
We use numerical simulations to study the behavior of 2D frictionless disk systems under cyclic shear as a function of reversal amplitude γ_r. Our studies focus on mean bulk and disk dynamics. These measurements suggest a crossover from a subdiffusive, γ_r dependent regime to a regime where the grain motions are diffusive, with properties dependent only on total shear strain. We discuss model stochastic processes that are consistent with these observations. Finally, we introduce a modified Mean-Squared Displacement (mMSD) which takes into account the motion of the neighborhood of nearby grains…
We study the two-dimensional (2D) shear flow of amorphous solids within variants of an elastoplastic model, paying particular attention to spatial correlations and time fluctuations of, e.g., local stresses. The model is based on the local alternation between an elastic regime and plastic events during which the local stress is redistributed. The importance of a fully tensorial description of the stress and of the inclusion of (coarse-grained) convection in the model is investigated; scalar and tensorial models yield very similar results, while convection enhances fluctuations and breaks the s…
Here we report the linear viscoelastic properties of amorphous poly(tetramethylene oxide) (PTMO), which is one of the key components in synthesizing segmented polyurethane (PU) elastomers. The temperature and molecular weight dependent viscoelastic behavior is investigated in detail by computing the shear relaxation modulus G(t) and the bulk relaxation modulus K(t), using the Green-Kubo relationship with correlation function. Our results provide new data for PTMO melt from the united atom model and also extend the existing knowledge of viscoelastic properties of polymers in general. The predic…
We study the elasticity of thermalized spring networks under an applied bulk strain. The networks considered are sub-isostatic random-bond networks that, in the athermal limit, are known to have vanishing bulk and linear shear moduli at zero bulk strain. Above a bulk strain threshold, however, these networks become rigid, although surprisingly the shear modulus remains zero until a second, higher, strain threshold. We find that thermal fluctuations stabilize all networks below the rigidity transition, resulting in systems with both finite bulk and shear moduli. Our results show a $T^{0.66}$ te…
We find an order-disorder transition from crystals to disordered crystals for static packings of frictionless spheres. While the geometric indicators are mostly blind to the transition, disordered crystals already exhibit properties apart from crystals. The transition approaches the close packing of hard spheres, giving rise to the singularity of the close packing point. We evidence that both the transition and properties of disordered crystals are jointly determined by the structural orders and density. Near the transition, the elastic moduli and coordination number of disordered crystals sho…
This Letter is motivated by some recent experiments on pan-cake shaped nano-samples of metallic glass that indicate a decline in the measured shear modulus upon decreasing the sample radius. Similar measurements on crystalline samples of the same dimensions showed a much more modest change. In this Letter we offer a theory of this phenomenon; we argue that such results are generically expected for any amorphous solid, with the main effect being related to the increased contribution of surfaces with respect to bulk when the samples get smaller. We employ exact relations between the shear modulu…
The modulus of a rigid network of harmonic springs depends on the sum of the energies in each of the bonds due to the applied distortion: compression in the case of the bulk modulus, $B$, or shear in the case of the shear modulus, $\mathcal{G}$. The distortion need not be global and we introduce a local modulus, $L_{i}$, associated with changing the equilibrium length of a single bond, $i$, in the network. We show that $L_{i}$ is useful for understanding many aspects of the mechanical response of the entire system. For example, it allows an understanding, and efficient computation, of how each…
We study the elasto-plastic behaviour of materials made of individual (discrete) objects, such as a liquid foam made of bubbles. The evolution of positions and mutual arrangements of individual objects is taken into account through statistical quantities, such as the elastic strain of the structure, the yield strain and the yield function. The past history of the sample plays no explicit role, except through its effect on these statistical quantities. They suffice to relate the discrete scale with the collective, global scale. At this global scale, the material behaves as a continuous medium; …
In this work we, study shear reversals of dense non-Brownian suspensions composed of cohesionless elliptical particles. By numerical simulations, we show that a new fragility appears for frictionless ellipses in the flowing states, where particles can flow indefinitely in one direction at applied shear stresses but shear-jams in the other direction upon shear stress reversal. This new fragility, absent in the isotropic particle case, is linked to the directional order of the elongated particles at steady shear and its reorientation at shear stress reversal, which forces the suspensions to pass…
We investigate the nonlinear viscoelastic behavior of a colloidal dispersion at the critical gel state using large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) rheology. The colloidal gel at the critical point is subjected to oscillatory shear flow with increasing strain amplitude at different frequencies. We observe that the first harmonic of the elastic and viscous moduli exhibits a monotonic decrease as the material undergoes a linear to nonlinear transition. We analyze the stress waveform across this transition and obtain the nonlinear moduli and viscosity as a function of frequency and strain ampli…
Soft particulate gels can reversibly yield when sufficient deformation is applied, and the characteristics of this transition can be enhanced or limited by designing hybrid hydrogel composites. While the microscopic dynamics and macroscopic rheology of these systems have been studied separately in detail, the development of direct connections between the two has been difficult, particularly with regard to the non-linear rheology. To bridge this gap, we perform a series of large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) numerical measurements on model soft particulate gels at different volume fraction…
A large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) is considered in the strain-controlled regime, and the interrelation between the Fourier transform (FT) and the stress decomposition (SD) approaches is established. Several definitions of the generalized storage and loss moduli are examined in a unified conceptual scheme based on the Lissajous--Bowditch plots. An illustrative example of evaluating the generalized moduli from a LAOS flow is given.
The sol-gel transition is studied in two purely entropic models consisting of hard spheres in continuous three-dimensional space, with a fraction $p$ of nearest neighbor spheres tethered by inextensible bonds. When all the tethers are present ($p=1$) the two systems have connectivities of simple cubic and face-centered cubic lattices. For all $p$ above the percolation threshold $p_c$, the elasticity has a cubic symmetry characterized by two distinct shear moduli. When $p$ approaches $p_c$, both shear moduli decay as $(p-p_c)^f$, where $f\simeq 2$ for each type of the connectivity. This result …
Nanoparticles with hydrophobic capping ligands and amphiphilic phospholipids are both found to self-assemble into monolayer films when deposited on the air water interface. By separately measuring the anisotropic stress response of these films under uniaxial compression, we obtain both the 2D compressive and shear moduli of a range of different thin nanoparticle and phospholipid films. The compressive moduli of both nanoparticle and lipid films in the solid phase are on the same order of magnitude, whereas the shear moduli of the lipid films are found to be significantly lower. Additionally th…
In this work we calculate the local elastic moduli in a weakly polydisperse 2DLennard-Jones glass undergoing a quasistatic shear deformation at zero temperature. The numerical method uses coarse grained microscopic expressions for the strain, displacement and stress fields. This method allows us to calculate the local elasticity tensor and to quantify the deviation from linear elasticity (local Hooke's law) at different coarse-graining scales. From the results a clear picture emerges of an amorphous material with strongly spatially heterogeneous elastic moduli that simultaneously satisfies Hoo…
Motivated by experiments on sheared suspensions that show a transition between ordered and disordered phases, we here study the long-time behavior of a sheared and overdamped 2-d system of particles interacting by repulsive forces. As a function of interaction strength and shear rate we find transitions between phases with vanishing and large single-particle diffusion. In the phases with vanishing single-particle diffusion, the system evolves towards regular lattices, usually on very slow time scales. Different lattices can be approached, depending on interaction strength and forcing amplitude…
Starting from an ideal crystalline state, we numerically study a nonequilibrium dynamical order- disorder transition promoted by the application of a periodic shearing protocol at low temperatures in model systems in two and three dimensions. We observe a continuous (2D) and discontinuous (3D) dynamical transition from an ordered to a disordered steady state. Through the analysis of large-scale simulations, we show that the amorphization mechanism around the discontinuous transition is reminiscent of spinodal decomposition.
Quantifying mechanical disorder in solids, either disordered crystals or glassy solids, and understanding its range of variability are of prime importance, e.g.~for discovering structure-properties relations. The bounds on the degree of mechanical fluctuations in disordered solids and how those depend on solids formation history remain unknown. Here, we study a broadly applicable quantifier of mesoscopic mechanical disorder $χ$, defined via the dimensionless fluctuations of the shear modulus, over a wide variety of disordered computer solids and upon varying different control parameters. $χ$ i…
