Yielding of Ultrastable Computer Glasses

We study mechanical yielding of ultrastable computer glasses generated by optimized swap Monte-Carlo simulations for polydisperse particles [1,2] as well as more realistic multi-component metallic glass models [3]. We observe brittle yielding associated with a sharp system-spanning shearband in various rheological settings, such as uniform shear and oscillatory deformation in two and three dimensions [4,5,6]. The observed behaviors are qualitatively different from the standard computer glasses that have been studied previously. Thus, our computational scheme opens up new opportunities to investigate the mechanical behaviors of metallic glasses in experimentally relevant conditions. As an application, we numerically test the scenario of shearband nucleation by artificially inserting a soft spot into a stable glass sample. We argue that brittle yielding in macroscopic samples is triggered by rare droplets of the soft spot [4].

[1] Berthier, Coslovich, Ninarello, and Ozawa, Phys. Rev. Lett., 116, 238002 (2018)
[2] Ozawa, Berthier, Biroli, Rosso, and Tarjus, PNAS, 115, 6656 (2018)
[3] Parmar, Ozawa, and Berthier
[4] Ozawa, Berthier, Biroli, and Tarjus
[5] Singh, Ozawa, and Berthier
[6] Yeh, Ozawa, Miyazaki, Kawasaki, and Berthier