What Determines the Yield Stress in Amorphous Solids?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the yield stress in amorphous solids depends on inter-particle potential parameters, using simulations and a scaling theory to unify data across different potentials and dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a simple scaling relation linking yield stress to fundamental potential parameters, validated across various potentials and spatial dimensions.

Findings

Yield stress depends on fundamental scales of the potential.

A scaling theory collapses data from different potentials.

The relation holds across multiple space dimensions.

Abstract

A crucially important material parameter for all amorphous solids is the yield stress, which is the value of the stress for which the material yields to plastic flow when it is strained quasi-statically at zero temperature. It is difficult in laboratory experiments to determine what parameters of the inter-particle potential effect the value of the yield stress. Here we use the versatility of numerical simulations to study the dependence of the yield stress on the parameters of the inter-particle potential. We find a very simple dependence on the fundamental scales which characterize the repulsive and attractive parts of the potential respectively, and offer a scaling theory that collapses the data for widely different potentials and in different space dimensions.