2025/12/14 by Long-Zhou Huang, Xu Yang, Huang, Long-Zhou +7
Engineering · Materials Science · #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Metallic Glasses and Amorphous Alloys #Quasicrystal Structures and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.12668
openalex publication_date 2025/12/14 · openalex created_date 2025/12/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It was recently shown that vortex-like topological defects with negative winding number in the vibrational modes of a two-dimensional glass under quasistatic shear correlate strongly with plastic events, offering a promising route to predict them. However, many of these vortices, a number that actually grows quadratically with mode frequency, are entirely unrelated to plasticity and arise simply from the underlying plane-wave structure of the modes. This raises doubts about the fundamental relevance of such defects to plastic rearrangements and limits their predictive power. Here, we introduce a geometrical filter based on the Nye dislocation density that, when applied to the vibrational modes, removes these spurious defects and reveals the true plastic precursors. Using simulations of a two-dimensional model glass, we show that this filtered approach consistently outperforms the conventional vortex-based method, particularly at small strains and when focusing on genuine plastic stress drops, offering a more robust tool to predicting plasticity in glasses from their undeformed initial state.