Dynamics of Reversible Plasticity in an Amorphous Solid

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zhicheng, Keim, Nathan C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Zhicheng
Keim, Nathan C.
author_facet Wang, Zhicheng
Keim, Nathan C.
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamics of Reversible Plasticity in an Amorphous Solid
Wang, Zhicheng
Keim, Nathan C.
Soft Condensed Matter
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Materials Science
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.
title Dynamics of Reversible Plasticity in an Amorphous Solid
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17816