Abstract
Amorphous solids have peculiar properties distinct from crystals. One of the most fundamental mysteries is the emergence of solidity in such nonequilibrium, disordered state without the protection by long-range translational order. A jammed system at zero temperature, although marginally stable, has solidity stemming from the space-spanning force network, which gives rise to the long-range stress correlation. Here, we show that such nonlocal correlation already appears at the nonequilibrium glass transition upon cooling. This is surprising since we also find that the system suffers from giant anharmonic fluctuations originated from the fractal-like potential energy landscape. We reveal that it is the percolation of the force-bearing network that allows long-range stress transmission even under such circumstance. Thus, the emergent solidity of amorphous materials is a consequence of nontrivial self-organisation of the disordered mechanical architecture. Our findings point to the significance of understanding amorphous solids and nonequilibrium glass transition from a mechanical perspective.
Highlights
Amorphous solids have peculiar properties distinct from crystals
We show that the long-range stress correlation in thermal amorphous solids emerges as a consequence of the effective mechanical equilibrium maintained by a subset of particles, or by a fraction of degrees of freedom in the high-dimensional configuration space
We show that the long-range stress correlations emerge as a result of the protocoldependent glass transition when the system falls out of equilibrium, which is intrinsically nonequilibrium in nature and not related to any hypothesised thermodynamic phase transition
Summary
Amorphous solids have peculiar properties distinct from crystals. One of the most fundamental mysteries is the emergence of solidity in such nonequilibrium, disordered state without the protection by long-range translational order. A step forward towards the solution may have emerged: the critical consequence of mechanical stability in the inherent state (IS) of the glass, i.e., the zero-temperature state in mechanical equilibrium in the absence of the thermal fluctuations, has been shown in the form of longrange static stress correlation, which decays as a power-law of 1/rd in d dimensions[3,4,5,6,7]. The observed long-range stress correlation in thermal amorphous solids cannot be explained by straightforwardly applying simple harmonic approximations to that in the inherent state at zero temperature This is because the correlation is established under giant anharmonicity, which is revealed in terms of the breakdown of force balance and the substantial deviation from a harmonic energy expansion, and more importantly, the fractal-like structure of PEL. Our study crucially establishes the emergence of long-range stress correlations under giant anharmonic effects at finite temperatures, shedding new light on the very nature of amorphous solids from the mechanical perspective
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