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Activity annealing leads to a ductile-to-brittle transition in amorphous solids
Active glasses are dense, disordered structures made up of motile constituents. Simulations now show that motility-driven annealing in such systems leads to mechanical changes, including increased brittleness.
In addition to showing similar yielding diagrams, we strengthen the correspondence to oscillatory shear by demonstrating diverging time scales to steady states, the possibility of memory encoding and reading, and the importance of stress reversals in the annealing process in both cases. Here, first, we make the correspondence to oscillatory shear concrete by discussing critical phenomena-like behaviour of diverging time scales and nature of memory formation and show similarities in the microscopic picture of annealing by demonstrating the importance of stress reversals in both cases. For instance, altering the confining geometry 22, 23, 24, adjusting the range of interparticle interactions 25, introducing inclusions into the embedding matrix 26 and varying preparation or annealing history 27 can all control the type of failure that occurs.
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