Thermalized formulation of soft glassy rheology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a thermalized version of soft glassy rheology that models strain history and energy landscapes, enabling detailed analysis of heterogeneous yielding and deformation thermodynamics in glassy materials.

Contribution

It extends soft glassy rheology to include thermalized strain degrees of freedom for more accurate modeling of glassy dynamics.

Findings

Thermalized and nonthermalized plastic flows exhibit distinct behaviors.

The method allows quantitative analysis of heterogeneous yielding.

It provides insights into nonequilibrium deformation thermodynamics.

Abstract

We present a version of soft glassy rheology that includes thermalized strain degrees of freedom. It fully specifies systems' strain-history-dependent positions on their energy landscapes and therefore allows for quantitative analysis of their heterogeneous yielding dynamics and nonequilibrium deformation thermodynamics. As a demonstration of the method, we illustrate the very different characteristics of fully-thermal and nearly-athermal plasticity by comparing results for thermalized and nonthermalized plastic flow.