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Updated: Sep 29, 2025

Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Role of Local Structure in the Enhanced Dynamics of Deformed Glasses
Entao Yang1, Robert A Riggleman1
1Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
Abstract:
External stress can accelerate molecular mobility of amorphous solids by several orders of magnitude. The changes in mobility are commonly interpreted through the Eyring model, which invokes an empirical activation volume. Here, we analyze constant-stress molecular dynamics simulations and propose a structure-dependent Eyring model, connecting activation volume to a machine-learned field, softness. We show that stress has a heterogeneous effect on the mobility that depends on local structure through softness. The barrier impeding relaxation reduces more for well-packed particles, which explains the narrower distribution of relaxation time observed under stress.
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