Excess entropy, microstructure, and rheology in disordered solid suspensions under shear

How do disordered particulate systems yield under shear? The answer to this question is challenging, though we know that particle-scale microscopic interactions and configurations are important for understanding how local rearrangements influence bulk responses. To date, it has been difficult to construct a universal local structural descriptor that can be related to the heterogenous rearrangement dynamics. In supercooled liquids and glasses, recent progress on data-driven structural descriptors has alleviated this issue in some systems. Recent work [Galloway et al. Nat. Phy. 2022] uncovered a connection between the structure and rheology of sheared dense suspensions utilizing the quantity excess entropy. In this work we extend this relationship between structure and rheology to the microstructural-level using local excess entropy. We analyze both experimental and simulated dense suspensions under oscillatory shear and explore how the microscopic structure and rheology evolve as systems approach and surpass yield.