Aging of amorphous materials under cyclic strain
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 123, pp. e2515075123
Abstract
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external conditions. Instead, amorphous materials often exhibit physical aging: an ever-slowing, nonexponential relaxation that can span a huge range of timescales. Here, we examine the aging behavior of three different amorphous materials subjected to slow periodic driving. The results reveal a generic aging phenomenon characterized by a logarithmic decay of dissipation per cycle. This observation is evaluated against several mesoscopic models of amorphous matter that successfully capture aging under static conditions: i) a collection of noninteracting relaxation processes ii) a noisy hysteron model with random pairwise interactions, and iii) a structural model consisting of a random network of bistable elastic bonds. We find that only the latter model reproduces all experimental findings and relates its success to its persistent, slow exploration of a complex energy landscape with clear signatures of replica symmetry breaking. Thus, cyclic driving emerges as a simple yet powerful protocol to characterize amorphous materials, probe their complex energy landscapes, and distinguish between different models.
Authors 5
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Dor Shohat corresponding
Affiliation as printed
Department of Condensed Matter Physics
School of Physics and Astronomy
Tel Aviv University
The Center for Physics and Chemistry of Living Systems
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Paul Baconnier corresponding
Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics
Affiliation as printed
AMOLF
Information in Matter
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North University of China · Weizmann Institute of Science
Affiliation as printed
Department of Chemical and Biological Physics
Faculty of Chemistry
North University of China
School of Mathematics
Sino-Europe Complexity Science Center
The Weizmann Institute of Science
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Martin van Hecke Aachen
Leiden University · Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics
Affiliation as printed
AMOLF
Huygens-Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory
Information in Matter
Leiden University
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Yoav Lahini corresponding
Affiliation as printed
Department of Condensed Matter Physics
School of Physics and Astronomy
Tel Aviv University
The Center for Physics and Chemistry of Living Systems
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