SciPost Phys. 19, 092 (2025) ·
published 10 October 2025
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We numerically investigate the athermal creep deformation of amorphous materials having a wide range of stability. The imposed shear stress serves as the control parameter, allowing us to examine the time-dependent transient response through both the macroscopic strain and microscopic observables. Least stable samples exhibit monotonicity in the transient strain rate versus time, while more stable samples display a pronounced non-monotonic S-shaped curve, corresponding to failure by sharp shear band formation. We identify a diverging timescale associated with the fluidization process and extract the corresponding critical exponents. Our results are compared with predictions from existing scaling theories relevant to soft matter systems. The numerical findings for stable, brittle-like materials represent a challenge for theoretical descriptions. We monitor the microscopic initiation of shear bands during creep responses. Our study encompasses creep deformation across a variety of materials ranging from ductile soft matter to brittle metallic and oxide glasses, all within the same numerical framework.
SciPost Phys. 18, 124 (2025) ·
published 10 April 2025
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Configurational entropy, or complexity, plays a critical role in characterizing disordered systems such as glasses, yet its measurement often requires significant computational resources. Recently, Rényi entropy, a one-parameter generalization of Shannon entropy, has gained attention across various fields of physics due to its simpler functional form, making it more practical for measurements. In this paper, we compute the Rényi version of complexity for prototypical mean-field disordered models, including the random energy model, its generalization, referred to as the random free energy model, and the $p$-spin spherical model. We first demonstrate that the Rényi complexity with index $m$ is related to the free energy difference for a generalized annealed Franz-Parisi potential with $m$ clones. Detailed calculations show that for models having one-step replica symmetry breaking (RSB), the Rényi complexity vanishes at the Kauzmann transition temperature $T_K$, irrespective of $m>1$, while RSB solutions are required even in the liquid phase. This study strengthens the link between Rényi entropy and the physics of disordered systems and provides theoretical insights for its practical measurements.
SciPost Phys. 3, 027 (2017) ·
published 12 October 2017
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We numerically study the jamming transition of frictionless polydisperse spheres in three dimensions. We use an efficient thermalisation algorithm for the equilibrium hard sphere fluid and generate amorphous jammed packings over a range of critical jamming densities that is about three times broader than in previous studies. This allows us to reexamine a wide range of structural properties characterizing the jamming transition. Both isostaticity and the critical behavior of the pair correlation function hold over the entire range of jamming densities. At intermediate length scales, we find a weak, smooth increase of bond orientational order. By contrast, distorted icosahedral structures grow rapidly with increasing the volume fraction in both fluid and jammed states. Surprisingly, at large scale we observe that denser jammed states show stronger deviations from hyperuniformity, suggesting that the enhanced amorphous ordering inherited from the equilibrium fluid competes with, rather than enhances, hyperuniformity. Finally, finite size fluctuations of the critical jamming density are considerably suppressed in the denser jammed states, indicating an important change in the topography of the potential energy landscape. By considerably stretching the amplitude of the critical "J-line", our work disentangles physical properties at the contact scale that are associated with jamming criticality, from those occurring at larger length scales, which have a different nature.
