Elastic avalanches reveal marginal behavior in amorphous solids

Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is well established, however, that the apparent linearity of stress with strain is actually a proxy for a much more complex behavior, with a microscopic plasticity that is reflected in diverging nonlinear elastic coefficients. Very generally, the complex structure of the energy landscape is expected to induce a singular response to small perturbations. In the athermal quasistatic regime, this response manifests itself in the form of a scale-free plastic activity. The distribution of the corresponding avalanches should reflect, according to theoretical mean-field calculations [S. Franz and S. Spigler, Phys. Rev. E 95, 022139 (2017)], the geometry of phase space in the vicinity of a typical local minimum. In this work, we characterize this distribution for simple models of glass-forming systems, and we find that its scaling is compatible with the mean-field predictions for systems above the jamming transition. These systems exhibit marginal stability, and scaling relations that hold in the stationary state are examined and confirmed in the elastic regime. By studying the respective influence of system size and age, we suggest that marginal stability is systematic in the thermodynamic limit.