Dynamics of Reversible Plasticity in an Amorphous Solid

TL;DR

This study investigates the reversible plasticity dynamics in amorphous solids through experiments on colloidal particles, revealing complex, frequency-dependent rearrangement behaviors with implications for understanding energy landscapes and rheology.

Contribution

It provides experimental insights into the timescales and hysteresis of particle rearrangements in amorphous solids under oscillatory shear, introducing methods to determine effective potential energies.

Findings

Rearrangement timescales span at least one decade.

Higher frequencies lead to faster and more hysteretic rearrangements.

Some rearrangements disappear above a crossover frequency.

Abstract

Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct configurations. While these repeating relaxations are typically considered in the limit of slow driving, their dynamics is less well understood. We perform experiments on a colloidal amorphous solid at an oil-water interface. The rearrangement timescales we observe span at least 1 decade, with no apparent upper bound. As frequency is increased, individual rearrangements appear faster and more hysteretic, but may disappear entirely above a crossover frequency -- suggesting that in practical experiments, the slowest rearrangements may be latent. We show how to find the effective potential energy that reproduces a particle's frequency-dependent motion. In rare cases, this potential energy has only one minimum. Our results have implications for the energy landscapes and rheology of amorphous or glassy solids, for sound propagation in nonlinear media, and for mechanical memory and history-dependence.