Mean-Field Scenario for the Athermal Creep Dynamics of Yield-Stress Fluids

Ductile-to-brittle transition and yielding in soft amorphous materials: perspectives and open questions

Soft amorphous materials are viscoelastic solids ubiquitously found around us, from clays and cementitious pastes to emulsions and physical gels encountered in food or biomedical engineering. Under an external deformation, these materials undergo a noteworthy transition from a solid to a liquid state that reshapes the material microstructure. This yielding transition was the main theme of a workshop held from January 9 to 13, 2023 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden. The manuscript presented here offers a critical perspective on the subject, synthesizing insights from the various brainstorming sessions and informal discussions that unfolded during this week of vibrant exchange of ideas. The result of these exchanges takes the form of a series of open questions that represent outstanding experimental, numerical, and theoretical challenges to be tackled in the near future.

Scaling Description of Creep Flow in Amorphous Solids

Amorphous solids such as coffee foam, toothpaste, or mayonnaise display a transient creep flow when a stress Σ is suddenly imposed. The associated strain rate is commonly found to decay in time as γ[over ˙]∼t^{-ν}, followed either by arrest or by a sudden fluidization. Various empirical laws have been suggested for the creep exponent ν and fluidization time τ_{f} in experimental and numerical studies. Here, we postulate that plastic flow is governed by the difference between Σ and the transient yield stress Σ_{t}(γ) that characterizes the stability of configurations visited by the system at strain γ. Assuming the analyticity of Σ_{t}(γ) allows us to predict ν and asymptotic behaviors of τ_{f} in terms of properties of stationary flows. We test successfully our predictions using elastoplastic models and published experimental results.

Creep failure of amorphous solids under tensile stress

Applying constant tensile stress to a piece of amorphous solid results in a slow extension, followed by an eventual rapid mechanical collapse. This "creep" process is of paramount engineering concern, and as such was the subject of study in a variety of materials, for more than a century. Predictive theories for τ_{w}, the expected time of collapse, are incomplete, mainly due to its dependence on a bewildering variety of parameters, including temperature, system size, tensile force, but also the detailed microscopic interactions between constituents. The complex dependence of the collapse time on all the parameters is discussed below, using simulations of strip of amorphous material. Different scenarios are observed for ductile and brittle materials, resulting in serious difficulties in creating an all-encompassing theory that could offer safety measures for given conditions. A central aim of this paper is to employ scaling concepts, to achieve data collapse for the probability distribution function (pdf) of lnτ_{w}. The scaling ideas result in a universal function which provides a prediction of the pdf of lnτ_{w} for out-of-sample systems, from measurements at other values of these parameters. The predictive power of the scaling theory is demonstrated for both ductile and brittle systems. Finally, we present a derivation of universal scaling function for brittle materials. The ductile case appears to be due to a plastic necking instability and is left for future research.

Mean-Field Theory of Yielding under Oscillatory Shear

We study a mean field elastoplastic model, embedded within a disordered landscape of local yield barriers, to shed light on the behavior of athermal amorphous solids subject to oscillatory shear. We show that the model presents a genuine dynamical transition between an elastic and a yielded state, and qualitatively reproduces the dependence on the initial degree of annealing found in particle simulations. For initial conditions prepared below the analytically derived threshold energy, we observe a nontrivial, nonmonotonic approach to the yielded state. The timescale diverges as one approaches the yielding point from above, which we identify with the fatigue limit. We finally discuss the connections to brittle yielding under uniform shear.

Orientational memory of active particles in multistate non-Markovian processes

The orientational memory of particles can serve as an effective measure of diffusivity, spreading, and search efficiency in complex stochastic processes. We develop a theoretical framework to describe the decay of directional correlations in a generic class of stochastic active processes consisting of distinct states of motion characterized by their persistence and switching probabilities between the states. For exponentially distributed sojourn times, the orientation autocorrelation is analytically derived and the characteristic times of its crossovers are obtained in terms of the persistence of each state and the switching probabilities. We show how nonexponential sojourn-time distributions of interest, such as Gaussian and power-law distributions, can result from history-dependent transitions between the states. The relaxation behavior of the correlation function in such non-Markovian processes is governed by the history dependence of the switching probabilities and cannot be solely determined by the mean sojourn times of the states.

Thermally activated flow in models of amorphous solids

Amorphous solids yield at a critical value Σ_{c} of the imposed stress Σ through a dynamical phase transition. While sharp in athermal systems, the presence of thermal fluctuations leads to the rounding of the transition and thermally activated flow even below Σ_{c}. Here we study the steady-state thermal flow of amorphous solids using a mesoscopic elastoplastic model. In the Hébraud-Lequex (HL) model we provide an analytical solution of the thermally activated flow at low temperature. We then propose a general scaling law that also describes the transition rounding. Finally, we find that the scaling law holds in numerical simulations of the HL model, a two-dimensional (2D) elastoplastic model, and previously published molecular dynamics simulations of 2D Lennard-Jones glass.

Elastoplastic Approach Based on Microscopic Insights for the Steady State and Transient Dynamics of Sheared Disordered Solids

We develop a framework to study the mechanical response of athermal amorphous solids via a coupling of mesoscale and microscopic models. Using measurements of coarse-grained quantities from simulations of dense disordered particulate systems, we present a coherent elastoplastic model approach for deformation and flow of yield stress materials. For a given set of parameters, this model allows us to match consistently transient and steady state features of driven disordered systems with diverse preparation histories under both applied shear-rate and creep protocols.

Multiple Types of Aging in Active Glasses

Recent experiments and simulations have revealed glassy features in, e.g., cytoplasm, living tissues and dense assemblies of self-propelled colloids. This leads to a fundamental question: how do these nonequilibrium (active) amorphous materials differ from conventional passive glasses, created by lowering temperature or increasing density? To address this we investigate the aging after a quench to an almost arrested state of a model active glass former, a Kob-Andersen glass in two dimensions. Each constituent particle is driven by a constant propulsion force whose direction diffuses over time. Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations we reveal rich aging behavior of this dense active matter system: short persistence times of the active forcing give effective thermal aging; in the opposite limit we find a two-step aging process with active athermal aging at short times and activity-driven aging at late times. We develop a dedicated simulation method that gives access to this longtime scaling regime for highly persistent active forces.

Unified Theoretical and Experimental View on Transient Shear Banding

Dense emulsions, colloidal gels, microgels, and foams all display a solidlike behavior at rest characterized by a yield stress, above which the material flows like a liquid. Such a fluidization transition often consists of long-lasting transient flows that involve shear-banded velocity profiles. The characteristic time for full fluidization τ_{f} has been reported to decay as a power law of the shear rate γ[over ˙] and of the shear stress σ with respective exponents α and β. Strikingly, the ratio of these exponents was empirically observed to coincide with the exponent of the Herschel-Bulkley law that describes the steady-state flow behavior of these complex fluids. Here we introduce a continuum model, based on the minimization of a "free energy," that captures quantitatively all the salient features associated with such transient shear banding. More generally, our results provide a unified theoretical framework for describing the yielding transition and the steady-state flow properties of yield stress fluids.

Precursors of fluidisation in the creep response of a soft glass

Via extensive numerical simulations, we study the fluidisation process of dense amorphous materials subjected to an external shear stress, using a three-dimensional colloidal glass model. In order to disentangle possible boundary effects from finite size effects in the process of fluidisation, we implement a novel geometry-constrained protocol with periodic boundary conditions. We show that this protocol is well controlled and that the longtime fluidisation dynamics is, to a great extent, independent of the details of the protocol parameters. Our protocol, therefore, provides an ideal tool to investigate the bulk dynamics prior to yielding and to study finite size effects regarding the fluidisation process. Our study reveals the existence of precursors to fluidisation observed as a peak in the strain-rate fluctuations, that allows for a robust definition of a fluidisation time. Although the exponents in the power-law creep dynamics seem not to depend significantly on the system size, we reveal strong finite size effects for the onset of fluidisation.

Creep dynamics of athermal amorphous materials: a mesoscopic approach

Yield stress fluids display complex dynamics, in particular when driven into the transient regime between the solid and the flowing state. Inspired by creep experiments on dense amorphous materials, we implement mesoscale elasto-plastic descriptions to analyze such transient dynamics in athermal systems. Both our mean-field and space-dependent approaches consistently reproduce the typical experimental strain rate responses to different applied steps in stress. Moreover, they allow us to understand basic processes involved in the strain rate slowing down (creep) and the strain rate acceleration (fluidization) phases. The fluidization time increases in a power-law fashion as the applied external stress approaches a static yield stress. This stress value is related to the stress over-shoot in shear start-up experiments, and it is known to depend on sample preparation and age. By calculating correlations of the accumulated plasticity in the spatially resolved model, we reveal different modes of cooperative motion during the creep dynamics.

Random critical point separates brittle and ductile yielding transitions in amorphous materials

We combine an analytically solvable mean-field elasto-plastic model with molecular dynamics simulations of a generic glass former to demonstrate that, depending on their preparation protocol, amorphous materials can yield in two qualitatively distinct ways. We show that well-annealed systems yield in a discontinuous brittle way, as metallic and molecular glasses do. Yielding corresponds in this case to a first-order nonequilibrium phase transition. As the degree of annealing decreases, the first-order character becomes weaker and the transition terminates in a second-order critical point in the universality class of an Ising model in a random field. For even more poorly annealed systems, yielding becomes a smooth crossover, representative of the ductile rheological behavior generically observed in foams, emulsions, and colloidal glasses. Our results show that the variety of yielding behaviors found in amorphous materials does not necessarily result from the diversity of particle interactions or microscopic dynamics but is instead unified by carefully considering the role of the initial stability of the system.