Scaling description of non-local rheology

The plastic flow of amorphous materials displays non-local effects, characterized by a cooperativity length scale ξ. We argue that these effects enter in the more general description of surface phenomena near critical points. Using this approach, we obtain a scaling relation between exponents that describe the strain rate profiles in shear driven and pressure driven flow, which we confirm both in numerical models and experimental data. We find empirically that the cooperative length follows closely the characteristic length previously extracted in homogenous bulk flows. This analysis shows that the often used mean field exponents fail to capture quantitatively the non-local effects. Our analysis also explains the unusually large finite size effects previously observed in pressure driven flows.