Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 52: Glasses and Glass transition (joint session DY/ DF/ CPP)

DY 52.3: Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 15:30–15:45, BH-N 128

Nonaffine deformations, glass transition, and yielding in disordered solids — •Alessio Zaccone — Physics-Department, Technische Universität München

A new approach to the glass transition has been recently developed from the angle of nonaffine elasticity. Due to structural disorder, the particle motions in glasses under shear do not merely follow the imposed affine pathways prescribed by the strain tensor of standard continuum linear elasticity, but deviate significantly to undergo additional nonaffine displacements. Importantly, these nearest-neighbour forces would exactly cancel out mutually in any ordered lattice with local center-inversion symmetry. The concept of nonaffine free energy of deformation can be applied to molecular and atomic glasses. The resulting scheme has been implemented to predict the T-dependence of the shear modulus of polymer glasses and its vanishing at the glass transition. The main effect leading to vanishing of rigidity can be identified with the decrease of the average effective intermolecular connectivity as the material expands upon increasing T. In turn, this makes the negative nonaffine contribution to free energy become increasingly more important as T rises, until the free energy of deformation vanishes at a critical temperature for mechanical instability, which is very close to the calorimetric glass transition. Besides nonaffinity, an important role is played by anharmonic interactions which control the thermal expansion coefficient of the glass, which in turn controls how connectivity decreases with increasing T.