On the density of shear transformation zones in amorphous solids

Abstract

We study the stability of amorphous solids, focusing on the distribution P(x) of the local stress increase x that would lead to an instability. We argue that this distribution is singular P(x)x^θ, where the exponent θ is non-zero if the elastic interaction between rearranging regions is non-monotonic, and increases with the interaction range. For a class of finite dimensional models we show that stability implies a lower bound on θ, which is found to lie near saturation. For quadrupolar interactions these models yield θ ~ 0.6 for d=2 and θ~ 0.4 in d=3 where d is the spatial dimension, accurately capturing previously unresolved observations in atomistic models, both in quasi-static flow and after a fast quench.

5 pages, 5 figures