Yield stress, heterogeneities and activated processes in soft glassy materials

TL;DR

This paper presents a microscopic, nonequilibrium theoretical framework for understanding the rheology of soft glassy materials, focusing on yield stress, flow heterogeneities, and activated processes, with some predictions awaiting experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a schematic mode-coupling theory to describe complex rheological phenomena in soft glassy materials, providing new insights into their microscopic behavior.

Findings

Description of yield stress within the theoretical model

Analysis of flow heterogeneities in soft glassy materials

Inclusion of activated processes in the rheological description

Abstract

The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a nonequilibrium schematic mode-coupling theory. This statistical mechanics approach to rheology results in a series of detailed theoretical predictions, some of which still awaiting for their experimental verification. We present new, preliminary, results about the description of yield stress, flow heterogeneities and activated processes within this theoretical framework.