# Particle pinning suppresses spinodal criticality in the shear banding instability

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the nature of shear banding instability in amorphous solids, providing evidence that particle pinning suppresses criticality by bounding correlation length, thus influencing failure mechanisms.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that particle pinning suppresses the critical spinodal behavior in shear banding, clarifying the role of disorder in amorphous solid failure.

## Key findings

- Pinned particles bound correlation length by their average distance
- Without pinning, correlation length scales with system size
- Particle pinning suppresses critical divergence in shear banding

## Abstract

Strained amorphous solids often fail mechanically by creating a shear-band. It had been understood that the shear banding instability is usefully described as crossing a spinodal point (with disorder) in an appropriate thermodynamic description. It remained contested however whether the spinodal is critical (with divergent correlation length) or not. Here we offer evidence for critical spinodal by using particle pinning. For a finite concentration of pinned particles the correlation length is bounded by the average distance between pinned particles, but without pinning it is bounded by the system size.