Shear-induced Criticality in Glasses Shares Qualitative Similarities with the Gardner Phase

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that shear-induced plastic events in 2D Lennard-Jones glasses exhibit statistical behaviors similar to the Gardner phase, suggesting a universal aspect of marginal stability in glasses.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence linking shear-induced plasticity in finite-dimensional glasses to the Gardner phase predicted by mean-field theories.

Findings

Plastic events show non-Debye scaling.

Plasticity exhibits Gardner-like statistical properties.

Results suggest universality of marginal stability in glasses.

Abstract

Although glass phases are found in various soft matter systems ubiquitously, we are still far from a complete understanding of them. The concept of marginal stability predicted by infinite-dimensional mean-field theories is drawing attention as a candidate for universal and distinguishing unique features of glasses. While among theoretical predictions, the non-Debye scaling has indeed been observed universally over various classes of glasses, and the Gardner phase is found only in hard sphere systems if we restrict ourselves to the physical dimensions. In this work, we numerically demonstrate that plastic events observed in two-dimensional Lennard-Jones glasses under quasistatic shear exhibit statistical properties that are qualitatively very similar to the Gardner phase.