Transition rates for slip-avalanches in soft athermal disks under quasi-static simple shear deformations

TL;DR

This paper investigates slip-avalanches in soft athermal disks under quasi-static shear, revealing heterogeneous force changes, power-law statistics, and a universal q-Gaussian distribution of transition rates, advancing microscopic understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical framework for transition rates of force changes, providing a microscopic theory of slip-avalanches in soft athermal disks.

Findings

Slip-avalanches cause sharp stress drops during steady shear.

Force changes during avalanches follow a q-Gaussian distribution.

Transition rates are independent of area fraction, indicating universality.

Abstract

We study slip-avalanches in two-dimensional soft athermal disks by quasi-static simulations of simple shear deformations. Sharp drops in shear stress, or slip-avalanches, are observed intermittently during steady state. Such the stress drop is caused by restructuring of the contact networks, accompanied by drastic changes of the interaction forces. The changes of the forces happen heterogeneously in space, indicating that collective non-affine motions of the disks are most pronounced when slip-avalanches occur. We analyze and predict statistics for the force changes, by transition rates of the force and contact angle, where slip-avalanches are characterized by their wide power-law tails. We find that the transition rates are described as a q-Gaussian distribution regardless of the area fraction of the disks. Because the transition rates quantify structural changes of the force-chains, our findings are an important step towards a microscopic theory of slip-avalanches in the experimentally accessible quasi-static regime.