SISSA Colloquium: Mechanical Failure in Amorphous Solids | 16 January, 3.30 pm

[Infopoint]

*SISSA Colloquium: Mechanical Failure in Amorphous Solids**
**A lecture by Itamar Procaccia of the Weizmann Institute of Science, 
Israel**
*
16 January, 3.30 pm
SISSA, "P. Budinich" Main Lecture Hall
Via Bonomea 265

The mechanical failure of amorphous media is a ubiquitous phenomenon 
from material engineering to geology. It has been noticed for a long 
time that the phenomenon is “scale-free”, indicating some type of 
criticality. In spite of attempts to invoke “Self-Organized 
Criticality”, the physical origin of this criticality, and also its 
universal nature, being quite insensitive to the nature of microscopic 
interactions, remained elusive. Recently Itamar Procaccia and 
collaborators proposed that the precise nature of this critical behavior 
is manifested by a spinodal point of a thermodynamic phase transition. 
Demonstrating this requires the introduction of an "order parameter" 
that is suitable for distinguishing between disordered amorphous 
systems. At the spinodal point there exists a divergent correlation 
length which is associated with the system-spanning instabilities (known 
also as shear bands) which are typical to the mechanical yield. The 
theory, the order parameter used and the correlation functions which 
exhibit the divergent correlation length are universal in nature and can 
be applied to any amorphous solid that undergoes mechanical yield.
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