CPM Seminar

The nonequilibrium physics of amorphous materials:
collective dynamics, emergent behavior, and memory effects

Joerg Rottler

Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of British Columbia

How does an amorphous solid flow? The rheomechanical properties of glassy materials (foams, emulsions, gels, colloidal pastes, amorphous metals and polymers) form the basis of their many applications, yet we lack a complete understanding of the underlying atomic scale plasticity mechanisms, nor do we have robust statistical theories of these strongly driven systems that describe the emergence of macroscopic flow heterogeneities. This talk will show how particle scale simulations provide insight into the properties and interactions of localized plastic events. We then show how mesoscale elastoplastic models and mean field theories can be constructed from the fundamental physics of such shear transformations. These models have greatly improved our current understanding of the critical behaviour near the yielding transition, the origin of memory effects in the nonequilibrium glassy state, and possible mechanisms of shear localization during plastic deformation.