Shearing a glass and the role of pin-delay in models of interface depinning

Abstract

When a disordered solid is sheared, yielding is followed by the onset of intermittent response that is characterized by slip in local regions usually labeled shear-transformation zones (STZ). Such intermittent response resembles the behavior of earthquakes or contact depinning, where a well-defined landscape of pinning disorder prohibits the deformation of an elastic medium. Nevertheless, a disordered solid is evidently different in that pinning barriers of particles are due to neighbors that are also subject to motion. Microscopic yielding leads to destruction of the local microstructure and local heating. It is natural to assume that locally a liquid emerges for a finite timescale before cooling down to a transformed configuration. For including this characteristic transient in glass depinning models, we propose a general mechanism that involves a "pin-delay" time Tpd, during which each region that slipped evolves as a fluid. The new timescale can be as small as a single avalanche time-step. We demonstrate that the inclusion of this mechanism causes a drift of the critical exponents towards higher values for the slip sizes $τ$, until a transition to permanent shear-banding behavior happens causing almost oscillatory, stick-slip response. Moreover, it leads to a proliferation of large events that are highly inhomogeneous and resemble sharp slip band formation. Our model appears to be qualitatively consistent with recent experiments and simulations of disordered solids under shear.