Universality of the Plastic Instability in Strained Amorphous Solids

Abstract

By comparing the response to external strains in metallic glasses and in Lennard-Jones glasses we find a quantitative universality of the fundamental plastic instabilities in the athermal, quasistatic limit. Microscopically these two types of glasses are as different as one can imagine, the latter being determined by binary interactions, whereas the former is determined by multiple interactions due to the effect of the electron gas that cannot be disregarded. In spite of this enormous difference the plastic instability is the same saddle-node bifurcation. As a result, the statistics of stress and energy drops in the elastoplastic steady state are universal, sharing the same system-size exponents.