Controlled mechanical failure in glasses via designed spatial inhomogeneity

V Vaibhav and J Horbach and P Chaudhuri, PHYSICAL REVIEW MATERIALS, 7, 095601 (2023).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.7.095601

In glasses under mechanical load, intrinsic spatial inhomogeneities at specific locations in the sample may cause shear banding. This allows us to initiate mechanical failure in a controlled manner. We perform molecular dynamics simulations to investigate inhomogeneous glass states under shear, using two different protocols to obtain these spatial inhomogeneities, viz., (i) by applying a temperature pulse, and (ii) by generating regions with a different degree of annealing via the swap Monte Carlo technique. In both cases, we find that shear banding is associated with a subtle interplay between stochasticity and local potential energy.

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