Dynamics of Reversible Plasticity in an Amorphous Solid

Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct states. While these repeating relaxations and their memory behaviors are well studied in the quasistatic regime, their dynamics is less well understood. We perform experiments on a colloidal amorphous solid at an oil-water interface. The rearrangement timescales we observe span at least 1 decade, with no apparent upper bound. As frequency is increased, individual rearrangements appear faster and more hysteretic, but may disappear entirely above a crossover frequency—suggesting that in practical experiments, the slowest rearrangements may be latent. We show how to find the effective potential energy that reproduces a particle's frequency-dependent response. Our results have implications for the rheology of amorphous or glassy solids, for sound propagation in nonlinear media, and for memories of dynamics.