Role of fluctuations in the yielding transition of two-dimensional glasses

TL;DR

This study investigates the yielding behavior of two-dimensional glasses with varying stabilities, revealing a discontinuous transition in stable glasses and highlighting differences from three-dimensional systems.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence of a nonequilibrium discontinuous transition in the yielding of stable 2D glasses and compares their behavior to 3D glasses, emphasizing disorder effects.

Findings

Stable glasses yield via a discontinuous transition.

A critical point separates brittle and ductile yielding.

2D glasses show larger fluctuations and rougher shear bands.

Abstract

We numerically study yielding in two-dimensional glasses which are generated with a very wide range of stabilities by swap Monte-Carlo simulations and then slowly deformed at zero temperature. We provide strong numerical evidence that stable glasses yield via a nonequilibrium discontinuous transition in the thermodynamic limit. A critical point separates this brittle yielding from the ductile one observed in less stable glasses. We find that two-dimensional glasses yield similarly to their three-dimensional counterparts but display larger sample-to-sample disorder-induced fluctuations, stronger finite-size effects, and rougher spatial wandering of the observed shear bands. These findings strongly constrain effective theories of yielding.