Correlations of non-affine displacements in metallic glasses through the yield transition

R Jana and L Pastewka, JOURNAL OF PHYSICS-MATERIALS, 2, 045006 (2019).

DOI: 10.1088/2515-7639/ab36ed

We study correlations of non-affine displacements during simple shear deformation of Cu-Zr bulk metallic glasses in molecular dynamics calculations. In the elastic regime, our calculations show exponential correlation with a decay length that we interpret as the size of a shear transformation zone in the elastic regime. This correlation length becomes system-size dependent beyond the yield transition as our calculation develops a shear band, indicative of a diverging length scale. We discuss these observations in the context of a recent proposition of yield as a first-order phase transition.

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