2013/07/05 by Jie Lin, Alaa Saade, Edan Lerner +2
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/105/26003
published as Europhys. Lett. 105, 26003 (2014) · 5 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2013/07/05 · arxiv updated 2014/11/19
We study the stability of amorphous solids, focusing on the distribution P(x) of the local stress increase x that would lead to an instability. We argue that this distribution is singular P(x)xθ, where the exponent θ is non-zero if the elastic interaction between rearranging regions is non-monotonic, and increases with the interaction range. For a class of finite dimensional models we show that stability implies a lower bound on θ, which is found to lie near saturation. For quadrupolar interactions these models yield θ ~ 0.6 for d=2 and θ~ 0.4 in d=3 where d is the spatial dimension, accurately capturing previously unresolved observations in atomistic models, both in quasi-static flow and after a fast quench.