The Potential Energy Landscape Perspective on Plasticity and Flow - Part II

Explore the advanced understanding of plasticity and flow mechanisms in amorphous solids and supercooled liquids in this comprehensive lecture. Delve into the significant progress made over the last two decades, examining how irreversible deformations in solids result from local rearrangements controlled by global elastic instabilities. Investigate the role of local yield stress heterogeneities and the creation of elastic strains that trigger secondary events, leading to plastic avalanches. Discover the surprising continuation of these events and correlations in finite strain rate and temperature conditions, extending into the Newtonian liquid regime. Analyze the crucial role of event-event correlations in determining non-Newtonian behavior. Gain insights into the flow of highly viscous liquids as a series of hops between inherent states, representing local minima of the potential energy surface. Understand how flow can be viewed as an accumulation of solid-solid (Eshelby) transformations, even in liquid states. This lecture, part of the Graduate School on "Non-equilibrium Processes in Physics and Biology" at the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics, offers a deep dive into the potential energy landscape perspective on plasticity and flow.