Local Yield Stress Analysis in Simulated 3D Glasses

The ‘Local Yield Stress’ (LYS) method was developed to characterize the local structure of a atomistic model of a glass in a way that provides insight into its plastic response. The local yield stress is characterized as the incremental stress needed to induce a structural instability when an outer shell surrounding of a patch of atoms is deformed affinely along various shear orientations, while allowing the structure at the core to rearrange via athermal quasi-static (AQS) simulation. Here we generalize the LYS method to three-dimensional systems. We describe a method to democratically sample local shear orientations and triaxialities. By applying the LYS analysis to as-quenched glasses, we are able to identify the statistics of the local yield stress distribution. In order to assess to predictability and persistence of this measure, a correlation is computed between these local yield stresses and the observed plastic events when the glasses are undergoing shear deformation within in AQS simulations.