Local shear transformations in deformed and quiescent hard-sphere colloidal glasses

We perform a series of deformation experiments on a monodisperse, hard-sphere colloidal glass while simultaneously following the three-dimensional trajectories of roughly 50,000 individual particles with a confocal microscope. In each experiment, we deform the glass in pure shear at a constant strain rate [(1-5)×10(-5) s(-1)] to maximum macroscopic strains (5%-10%) and then reverse the deformation at the same rate to return to zero macroscopic strain. We also measure three-dimensional particle trajectories in an identically prepared quiescent glass in which the macroscopic strain is always zero. We find that shear transformation zones exist and are active in both sheared and quiescent colloidal glasses, revealed by a distinctive fourfold signature in spatial autocorrelations of the local shear strain. With increasing shear, the population of local shear transformations develops more quickly than in a quiescent glass and many of these transformations are irreversible. When the macroscopic strain is reversed, we observe partial elastic recovery, followed by plastic deformation of the opposite sign, required to compensate for the irreversibly transformed regions. The average diameter of the shear transformation zones in both strained and quiescent glasses is slightly more than two particle diameters.