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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Stress Distribution During Cold Compression of Rocks and Mineral Aggregates Using Synchrotron-based X-Ray Diffraction
Published on: May 20, 2018
Emergent Fractal Energy Landscape as the Origin of Stress-Accelerated Dynamics in Amorphous Solids
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA.
Abstract:
The ageing dynamics in a multiplicity of metastable glasses are investigated at various thermomechanical conditions. By using data analytics to deconvolute the integral effects of environmental factors (e.g., energy level, temperature, stress), and by directly scrutinizing the minimum energy pathways for local excitations, we demonstrate external shear would make the system's energy landscape surprisingly fractal and create an emergent low-barrier mode with highly tortuous pathways, leading to an accelerated relaxation. This finding marks a departure from the classic picture of shear-induced simple bias of energy landscape. The insights and implications of this study are also discussed.
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