Shearing small glass-forming systems: a potential energy landscape perspective

TL;DR

This paper extends the potential energy landscape framework to sheared glass-forming systems, distinguishing plastic events and analyzing elementary plastic behavior in small systems, with implications for understanding macroscopic yielding.

Contribution

It introduces a coarse-grained PEL approach for sheared systems, identifying inherent structures and minimized structure transitions as key plastic events.

Findings

Different properties of stress-strain curves in small vs. large systems

MS transitions relate to stress overshoot phenomena

Limit cycles can be characterized in small systems

Abstract

Understanding the yielding of glass-forming systems upon shearing is notoriously difficult since it is a strong non-equilibrium effect. Here we show that the concept of the potential energy landscape (PEL), developed for the quiescent state, can be extended to shearing. When introducing an appropriate coarse graining of the extended PEL for sheared systems, one can distinguish two fundamentally different types of plastic events, namely inherent structures (IS) vs. minimized structure (MS) transitions. We apply these concepts to non-cyclic and cyclic shearing of small systems, which allow us to characterize the properties of elementary plastic events. Whereas the general properties of the stress-strain curves are similar to larger systems, a closer analysis reveals significantly different properties. This allows one to identify the impact of the elastic coupling in larger systems. The concept of MS enables us to relate the stress overshoot of a single trajectory to the emergence of an MS transition. Furthermore, the occurrence of limit cycles can be characterized in great detail for the small systems and connections to the properties of the PEL can be formulated. Possible implications of our small-system results for the macroscopic limit are discussed.