Locality and Non-locality in Elasto-plastic Responses of Amorphous Solids

TL;DR

This paper uses numerical experiments to challenge the assumption that plastic deformations in amorphous solids are localized, showing instead that they are non-local and exhibit sub-extensive scaling with non-universal exponents.

Contribution

It provides evidence that plastic deformations in amorphous solids are non-local and identifies sub-extensive scaling laws with non-universal exponents based on disorder and system parameters.

Findings

Plastic deformations are not localized in amorphous solids.

Plastic deformation scales sub-extensively with system size.

Scaling exponents depend on disorder and system parameters.

Abstract

A number of current theories of plasticity in amorphous solids assume at their basis that plastic deformations are spatially localized. We present in this paper a series of numerical experiments to test the degree of locality of plastic deformation. These experiments increase in terms of the stringency of the removal of elastic contributions to the observed elasto-plastic deformations. It is concluded that for all our simulational protocols the plastic deformations are not localized, and their scaling is sub-extensive. We offer a number of measures of the magnitude of the plastic deformation, all of which display sub-extensive scaling characterized by non-trivial exponents. We provide some evidence that the scaling exponents governing the sub-extensive scaling laws are non-universal, depending on the degree of disorder and on the parameters of the systems. Nevertheless understanding what determines these exponents should shed considerable light on the physics of amorphous solids.